


Wish You Weren't Here

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Origami, Sharing a Bed, Smut, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-04 16:34:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 27,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3074513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a Tumblr prompt for a Kidnap AU Angsty, with smut.  </p><p> </p><p>Mindy and Danny are kidnapped.  Time setting:  Season 1,  before either doctor became tolerable to the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Harrison Ford Never Had to Put Up With This

Nothing makes sense.  

Everything is disjointed, and all Mindy can catch are flickers of light in a thick, deep darkness. It feels as though she is drowning, but she’s been at her desk, studying Mrs. Morgan’s non-stress test results, and definitely not near any bodies of water.

Something keeps pulling her under, though, in and out of consciousness, and she finally stops fighting and succumbs to the mist that settles over her brain, and slowly sinks her into the darkness.

* * *

 

She sits up quickly, too quickly, her head swirling in bright colors not furnished by her surroundings, and jams her shoulder into the corner of something unyielding, and apparently metal, judging by the high pitched scrape against the floor.

The object protests her approach, rudely, and she rubs what she is sure will become a terrifying purple and blue bruise in a matter of moments.

She surveys her attacker with the nastiest skunk eye she can muster on short notice: a rusted out Army issue cot, topped with a lumpy, mildewed mattress.

A groan comes from behind her, and she jumps half out of her skin, her heart beating wildly, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me: I’m too young to die!” She shouts, surprised at how scratchy and uncharacteristically deep her voice is, from what has to have been previous screaming.

“Mindy, please, don’t yell. He doesn’t like it when you yell.” That voice is deep, too, and sounds distinctly like the accent of an outer borough.

It sounds very specifically like Danny Castellano, which is bananas, because why would she ever be anywhere that isn’t the office with Danny?

She can barely fathom what Outside the Office Danny would be like, but she has always imagined that it probably involved cigar humidors and speakeasies and some kind of pungent cheese, because what the hell did that old man do outside of work? He didn’t have discernible hobbies, or outside interests, or much interaction with people in general. Mindy wasn’t sure if he even talked to his patients.

The universe must have a very strange and downright pushy desire for her to spend time with grumpy and mean Danny, and Mindy knew that the only way she’d do it was if her hands were literally tied (and they are, and the plastic zip tie is digging uncomfortably into her slim, delicate wrists as she narrates to herself).“Where are we? What are you doing here? Did you finally kidnap me and drag me to your sex dungeon?” Mindy swings at him with her bound hands, and Danny deftly outmaneuvers her blows.

He purses his lips and manages to look way past boundlessly annoyed, so business as usual. “That would be funny if it wasn’t partially true.” In a final kiss off, he scoots around, all _elbows, floor, elbows, floor_ and finally ends up with his back to her, quiet again.

Her head hurts, her mouth is dry, and Danny’s decidedly bony elbow is most definitely stuck in her ribcage, due to their enclosure in this small space. All she can see is dirty, damp walls, and a tiny glass block window that yields little light.  It must be daybreak, judging from the amount of sun that is sneaking through the basement window.  She has no idea how they got this way, other than all that darkness must have been a car trunk or a bag over her head. She has a vague flash of having heard a brief scuffle out near reception, while she was reading the test results, but no information outside of that. Other than hours of experience watching _Law and Order: SVU_ and at least one million _Dateline_ spousal murder specials.

And rule number one:

“Danny, this is a pretty desperate ploy to get me to sleep with you.” Mindy hisses.

“I really don’t see how you can think I have anything in the world to do with this. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not exactly dangling the key to our cell over your head.” His voice sounds far away, even as he squirms to turn himself back to face her. “He must have conked you on the melon harder than I thought.” After rearranging his limbs, Danny reaches up to tilt her head back, and peers into her pupils.

His hands are bound in a similar manner to hers. In the dim light, she can make out a cut bleeding over Danny’s left eye, and mottled red splotches that could only be described as knuckle marks along his jaw.

“Maybe I should be interrogating you about this. Was there a fun run scheduled?”  He gives her a harsh look.  

“You can’t keep lording that over me. You arrange one fake kidnapping—“

“Past behavior is the greatest indicator of future behavior, Lahiri, I’m just going with facts.”

“I didn’t arrange this one, jerk.”

“Well then, Mindy, we were kidnapped.  By an _unknown_ assailant.” Danny clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and continues studying her physical responses to stimuli.

She hasn’t spent this much time in close proximity to Danny since their residency; they usually find it easiest (maybe it's best?) to stay at least 500 feet from each other in the office. But there she is, bound (thankfully, not gagged) and possibly concussed with her second to least favorite member of Shulman and Associates (Beverly being last, because Mindy tends to be slow to forgive those who rearrange her face without permission) in a basement cell.

“When’s your birthday?” Danny jolts her back into the now, still performing his mental status examination.

“June 24th, 1989.”

Danny furrows his brow and mentally performs the calculations, “How tall are you?”

“Five feet ten inches.”

“You definitely have a concussion.” He releases her chin from his grip, and Mindy momentarily worries that she really is concussed. Not because she can’t recite her (correct) birthday, but because that actually had felt good, with his big hand on her face, and his eyelashes are really, really, long and something about how he’s looking at her, gently, makes her stomach feel oddly warm, “Do me a favor and try not to fall asleep, okay?”

Mindy shakes her head, “I don’t have a concussion. Those are my aspirational numbers. I’m just so used to saying them I think I’ve started to believe them.”

Danny rolls his eyes, any of his concern for her well-being ebbing from his face, “I still feel like this is just another one of your capers. And I’m just collateral damage.”

“My capers? As in Great Muppet or those little weird green leaves I make Morgan pick out of my salads?”

“Great…Muppet…” Danny parses the words as if he’s trying to picture what Muppet capers actually taste like or if they just have really huge, googly eyes.

She’s already losing patience with him, and they’ve been conscious for six minutes, “Ugh, what are you even talking about?  How is this my fault now?”

“What I’m talking about,"  His voice rises in proportion to his annoyance, "Is how you always have a plan or a scheme or you’re rubbing together two sticks and blowing glitter into a vortex—however it is that you do things, instead of working for them.” He rubs his temple, his left hand hanging awkwardly over his right as he does so, like he’s trying to undo the strange images he’s created in his head, just for purposes of succeeding in this conversation.

“I do not blow glitter into a vortex—I have no idea what that would entail, but when we get out of here, I am absolutely googling that. Or at least uploading the idea onto my Tumblr.”

“I wasn’t suggesting…it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a complaint. I was complaining.”  He groans, closing his eyes in defeat.

“Oh, how I wish that made any difference to me.” Mindy sing-songs.  Yep, this is going to be a long last few days of her life.

“We have to get out of here. Correction: I have to get out of here. You can stay. Whatever.”

“Very funny, Castellano.”

“I wasn’t making a joke.”

“Well, seeing as we are going to die here, I hope that you choose your last words wisely. Nothing about your mother.”

“But I love my ma.” He says it like he’s twelve, and not a grown man who has completed eight years of post secondary education. Mindy’s overheard more than one overwrought phone conversation between Danny and his mother, and she knows they have some creepy close _Manchurian Candidate_ stuff going on, if Danny’s inability to maintain a long term relationship is any indication.

“Oh my god, you are super lame,” Mindy knocks her head against the rusted cot, this time with intent. “We have to get out of here. But first, we have to figure out where the hell this is, and who the hell would want to take us.”

“And what they want to do with us now that they have us.”

Mindy glances over at her fellow hostage, the man who once told her that she had the maturity level of a Bratz doll (and she loudly questioned his knowledge of Bratz dolls, but that was beside the point), and she knew that he was her only hope. _This is not the kidnapping fantasy you were looking for, Lahiri, but this is the one you got. Make do._ “All right, we’re gonna _Star Wars_ this shit.”

“What?”  Danny's eyebrows are now officially located in his hairline, his incredulity taking shape swiftly.

“You know, when they’re stuck in the trash compactor on the Death Star--"

“Hold up," Danny interrupts, "You’ve watched _Star Wars_?  It's an allegory for war and politics and ---”

“Danny. It is a rom-com set in space. Han Solo and Princess Leia?  Hello.  That is six kinds of hot.  Not to mention, all that unfortunate Luke and Leia stuff before they figure out they're basically _Flowers in the Attic_. Frankly, I’m surprised that _you’ve_ seen _Star Wars_. It’s in color.”

“I’m a red-blooded American male between the ages of 8 and 80. Of course I’ve seen _Star Wars_. Anyway, you have a robot that is going to save us? Because that was how they got out of the trash compactor.” He's turning a little bit red, his neck beginning to match the coloring of his injuries.

No matter the setting, or the threat of impending death, Mindy realizes that she really does enjoy riling up this tiny Italian man.  She now very clearly understands the cliche, _like shooting fish in a barrel._

And anyway, she kind of forgot that bit about C3PO.  In her head, Princess Leia used her slender, yet well muscled thighs to pry apart the rapidly closing walls.  “Fine, laugh it up, Fuzz Ball. I’m gonna figure out a way out of this, and you’ll be lucky if I let you in on it.”

"Wake me up when the Stormtroopers get here."  Danny crosses his arms, and turns back to his side, facing the wall.  "We're all gonna die."


	2. The First Forty-Eight

Except Mindy doesn’t have a plucky robot, or, if she’s honest, a real grasp of the _Star Wars_ movies in general, outside of some gifs she saw on Tumblr, and a real appreciation for the face of a young Harrison Ford. Therefore, somewhere around the second hour of their capture, she resigns herself to a fate much like that of the golden bikini-clad-chained-to-Jabba-the-Hutt-Princess Leia, but if Jabba was swarthier, smaller, and zero fun at parties.

By the fourth hour, Mindy has already cataloged each and every crack in the foundation, bend in the duct work, and every amorphous patch of something Danny is _100 percent positive, Mindy!_ is asbestos. She has also successfully ignored most of Danny’s lecturing about said features, including utility, age, and in the case of the last, approximate time it will take to fill their lungs with sludge and smother them where they sit. He gets a little more worked up about this than he rightfully should, Mindy thinks, even though the idea that they might not die at the hands of their abductor, but instead a cancer like mesothelioma, is kind of annoying, she has to admit. “I mean, you can’t take the time to replace a drop ceiling? It’s a much more affordable option than cancer treatment!”

Mindy wishes that she could teleport herself anywhere but her current locale, but no amount of nose twitching and eyelid squeezing manages to aid her in that endeavor. Even if she could use of both her hands, she wouldn’t be able to stretch her arms out without touching the opposite wall. She’s been in larger dressing rooms. _Oh, the sale at Nieman Marcus_ , she remembers, and inadvertently makes a small mewling noise in despair. Danny gives her a sidelong glance and shifts around uncomfortably. She’s been successfully ignoring the cruddy yellow bucket in the corner for the better part of five hours, but she realizes that she’s going to have to recognize the (plastic) elephant in the room eventually.

“Danny, please tell me that bucket is for our light mopping duties.”

Danny, not previously known for his comedic stylings, nods agreeably and says, “No.”

“Oh God, that is so gross.” Mindy moans in protest, “Can we just promise now that whatever we see and hear as a result of this---travesty, we will hold completely in the depths of our long term memory, never to be heard from again? And we also vow to invest in electro- shock therapy in order to keep any of it from surfacing?” Listening to Danny urinate, or God forbid, seeing it, is more than enough to cause her deep and unmitigated anxiety and despair. “What happens in Psycho Basement stays in Psycho Basement.”

Danny nods again, this time in congruence with his words, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The floor boards above them creak with use, and Mindy inches closer to Danny. For as bored as she’s been, she also hasn’t wanted to think about the people creeping around over their heads: what they could do to them, what they could want from them, or even worse, how she and Danny were expected to survive this.

It seems easier to distract herself, and currently, her only source of entertainment is the surliest doctor from her office.  Up close, Danny’s jaw is becoming a mottle of purple and yellowish green bruises, and it looks painful. “I didn’t even ask you—how’s your face?” Mindy reaches up to skim her hand lightly over his injuries, and turns his face gently toward the diminishing light entering their makeshift cell.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore.” Danny averts his eyes and pulls his face away from her grasp. _Okay, weirdo._

“Was it because you tried to fight them off?”

Danny shakes his head, “I saw a man lurking in reception, went out to check it out, and the next thing I know, I’m here.”

“Do you think he knows us?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“What do you think he wants?”

Danny shakes his head, again, the force of which is clearly proportional to his lack of patience, “I don’t know what his angle is, Min. He currently has two successful Manhattan OB/GYNs hostage in his basement. I assume he thinks he can get some kind of ransom for us. Or he’s one of those deranged lunatics that plans on making a skin suit out of us. Take your pick.”

She doesn’t want to pick, and she certainly doesn’t want to consider those options, so instead Mindy pushes on Danny’s shoulder to help aid her in pulling herself into a sitting position, and sits with her knees up, her tied hands resting on top of them, “I always knew I’d be an Amber Alert.”

Danny shifts around too, his legs straight out in front of him, shoulder touching hers, “You say that as a point of pride.”

“I mean, I always thought I’d be most famous for marrying Michael Fassbender, or the sudden life-saving surgery that I perform on Kim Kardashian when she goes into labor on a crowded, broken down subway train, but I’ll take an all points bulletin, if that’s all I can get.”

Danny rolls his head on his shoulders, clearly exhausted. “I hope that you know that you’re certifiable. Absolutely bonkers.”

Mindy chooses to ignore him. She’s gotten through most of their work-days like that, anyway. Mindy kicks off her heels, and wiggles her toes, with their two day old coat of _I Know What Boys Like_ periwinkle, and it gives her a twinge to think that she may not make it to her next scheduled pedicure, “You know, this is why people don’t work late at the office, Danny.”

“Excusing laziness with the threat of death; that’s rich, even for you.” Danny scoffs.

“I stayed late to catch up on paperwork one night out of 365 and look what happened!”

“I stay late to catch up at least three nights a week and this has NEVER happened before. I think we can both see the least common denominator here.” With his hands fused together, he can’t get up to his full force of traditional gesticulation, and instead, he looks as though he’s attempting to make emphatic, angry shadow puppets against the concrete walls. If he wasn’t so maddening, it would be half way amusing.

“So this is my fault now. How am I at fault? Enlighten me, please.”

“Well, I certainly don’t see how this was my fault. I was doing paperwork and I took a stun gun to the kidney. We don’t have a drill for that. But let me tell you, we will from now on! I am definitely filing a grievance—“

“Great, Danny, you getting litigious with the practice is going to solve all our problems. Hello? We’re captives. Let’s figure out an escape plan.”

“I don’t think escape is an option.” The footsteps above them fade; a television blasts gunfire and heavy metal music in the distance. Mindy fervently hopes it is the television, at any rate.

“Well, just sitting here and letting some whackjob murder us is also not an option, Danny.”

“Our hands are literally tied. Plus, people are going to notice we’re missing, Min. It’s not like we don’t have family and friends who will just let us disappear without trying to find us.”

“Well, one of us does, anyway. I don’t really see you as this super social bro-hound, out trolling for strange---”

“Were those actual English language words?” Danny blanches, “I have friends. What kind of person—“ His mouth pinches as if he’s deciding what kind of person he really is.

“Well, you act like you were raised by wolves.”

“That would assume I don’t have a family, not a lack of friends.” Danny says, a little too smugly.

“My point exactly.”

Danny scowls. “I have friends.”

“Name them.” Mindy challenges.

He ticks them off, on his fingers, “Reynoldo, my trash collector. Ray, my contractor. Vito my barber and Vito my butcher, two different guys. Terry, down at the gym.”

“Who else are you paying to be your friend Danny? Do you have a cleaning lady too?”

“I wouldn’t say we’re friendly—more like acquaintances.” Danny shrugs."She's a Patriots fan.  It's hard to get around that sometimes."

“You haven’t named one person that doesn’t provide you a good or service.”

A few weeks ago, she finally tricked Danny into saying, “What?” after she pulled the age-old junior high “ _Grumpy-Know-It-All-A-Hole-Doctor-Says-What_ ” at a staff meeting, and pointing out to Danny that he actually had zero friends was not yielding the same level of vindication. She never wanted to be the Judd Nelson in this scenario, and she can’t really put her finger on why Danny wouldn’t have more (unpaid) people in his life.

Danny wasn’t hard to look at, with the lashes and the curls and the weird blankly innocent look he’d get when she fought with him, and when he wasn’t being an insufferable jerk, he was even mostly pleasant to talk to, under the right circumstances (basement prisons, notwithstanding). He shouldn’t have to name friends on his fingers.

“I don’t need a lot of people around all the time.”

“But you need some people,” She pushes.

“I have some people. And it doesn’t really matter when you’re locked up in some weirdo’s basement. The Vitos will notice when I don’t show up to get my steaks or my haircut. Where are your friends right now?”

“Organizing a candle light vigil. Maybe holding a press conference? I hope they find the photo that I have pre-approved for such an event. I saved it on my phone as my ICE, y’know, in case of emergency?”

Danny groans. “Oh boy.”

Mindy’s stomach growls, interrupting Danny’s opportunity for an unwelcome lecture, “Man, I am starving. I don’t go this long between meals, ever. I mean, with my metabolism---“

He glares at her, “Your metabolism?”

“My stomach is eating my spine, Danny; you wouldn’t like me when I’m hangry.”

“That’s not a word.”

“It is so.”

“That is a made up word and you know it.”

“People my age made it up so I’m using it.” She would cross her arms if physically capable, so instead she gives him a very telling look, _oh yeah_ , _so this is why Danny has to pay his butcher to watch the Super Bowl with him_. He would knock his mother over for the last word.

“You are not a teenager, Mindy, no matter what section of Macys you’re shopping in.”

It probably isn’t polite to wish that your fellow captive would be beaten senseless just by virtue of his sheer stubborn unwillingness to admit that hangry is a legitimate adjective, but Mindy isn’t feeling particularly polite anymore.

“Let’s just go to our separate corners. Where we don’t speak. Or look at each other. Or acknowledge one another’s existence on earth.”

“Deal, sister.” Danny sticks his hands out for an impromptu gentleman's agreement. "No talking.  Until we're rescued."

"Deal."


	3. People Like That Are The Only People Here

And they don’t speak to each other, for upwards of six hours. Okay, fine, it feels like six hours, but it might actually be more like six minutes, or forty-five; time is not exactly passing linearly anymore, not without some kind of electronic or telephonic distraction. And to be honest, no matter how much time has actually passed, it still might be the longest Mindy’s ever gone without utilizing her larynx, and she worries that it might atrophy without proper employ.

Mindy loses interest in her attempt to name new constellations within the pattern of multi-colored stars on her printed shirt, and she searches for another form of entertainment.  _Let's Bother Danny for $200, Alex._ “We’re going to have to make some decisions about our sleeping arrangements pretty soon, you know.” She relaxes with the knowledge that her voice is still its normal lilting cadence.

It's evident that what light they have is quickly dissipating, and Mindy worries that it won’t be long before their tiny room suffocates with darkness. She doesn’t want to think about what that means for them; it’s been hours, and the hours will soon pass into an entirely new day.

And to be forced to spend that night crammed into a tiny horrible bed with a tiny horrible man doesn’t make it any less terrifying.

Danny casually leans in the opposite corner, looking like he’s auditioning to model the latest trend in wrist bondage. He’s somehow managed to roll up the sleeves of his blue checked oxford shirt, and he's spent more time than strictly necessary transfixed by a certain amoebic shaped dark patch on the wall. The Danny that she’s used to in the office is always heading somewhere, fiddling with paperwork, reading a book. He’s always busy, moving, possibly muttering about idle hands and works of the devil. She’s never seen him truly still. Not unless she counts the times she’s found him asleep on the couch in the doctor’s lounge, although even then, he’s mostly restless and wired. “Hmm?”

“Then, of course, we will resume not speaking.” She holds her hands up, pointing with her index finger, _one second_.

“What arrangements? We’ll take turns.” He shrugs, completely abandoning any pretense of chivalry.

“We most certainly will not!” Mindy protests, striding over to him, chest puffed with indignation, “We have to share. This floor is disgusting, and if you thought there was asbestos in the ceiling---“ She trails off, and gleefully observes the flash of sheer terror spreading across Danny’s face. _Guess a human woman isn’t so horrifying after all, home slice_.

“No.” His lips are set in a grim line, and he stands up straight to face her. He twitches, as if he wants to fold his arms across his chest, and instead drops his hands in front of him impotently. “No way, Mindy.”

She has no choice now, go big or go, well, to a filthy concrete floor, “What. Are you afraid you’ll wake up expressing your true feelings for me?”

To his credit, Danny doesn’t flinch, although he does give her a bit of an incoherent growl and mumble something that sounds awfully close to _selfish drama queen_ under his breath.

The dance of cramming them both on the hideously lumpy, and probably chock full o’ syphilis, old school roll away bed is awkward at best. Danny lays on his side, arms tucked up under his chin, and even his smaller frame fills the majority of the mattress. “Scooch over, rover,” Mindy demands, wedging herself as far from Danny and as near to the wall without touching it as she can.  She imagines she looks like a miserable, yet sexy, sardine.

Upon further review, sharing the cot seems like less of a victory and more of a hassle.  She should have demanded he take the floor.  Hindsight, and all.

“You know, the average full size mattress is equivalent to the space of a baby’s crib, per person.” Mindy announces.  She has more non sequiturs where that came from.  He'll be in for a long night.

Danny doesn’t respond.

“I will take your angry silence as tacit agreement that we are in a much smaller space, and boy, wouldn’t it be nice if one of us manned up and took the floor.” Mindy hints.

“In your dreams, baby cakes.”

She chooses to ignore the baby cakes part and just feel outraged about the part where she isn’t getting her way. This is the Danny she’s familiar with, the one that is a great big bag of dicks. A bag of dicks with really well-developed forearms, somehow. _Stop it._ She wasn't sure why she couldn't stop thinking about his rolled up sleeves.  Probably the hunger melting her brain cells.

Her face is practically crammed into his shoulder blades, and with daylight slipping finally away, she can barely make out his silhouette.  She arranges and rearranges herself behind him, made more difficult due to her inability to utilize both hands.  The cellar dampness seeps into her pores, a bone-deep chill pervading her body.  The temptation to scoot closer to Danny is real, if not for his warmth, but for even the tiniest bit of comfort.

Even if he's a bag of dicks, he's the only bag of dicks she's got right now.  

 _Don't fall asleep.  Don't fall asleep.  Don't fall asleep._ It's a trick she used to use in medical school, when she was keyed up before a test or after a particularly bad day; if she chanted _Don't fall asleep_ , she thought she could trick her brain into doing the opposite.  

And from the death knell of Danny’s irritating breathing, he's not sleeping either. “Are you in an iron lung? What is all that racket?” 

And what is that other noise?

 _Sproing. Sproing. Sproing._ The miniature bed vibrates with the force of Danny’s movements, his breathing too ragged and heavy, and though it’s too dark to verify, he definitely sounds sweaty.

“You are disgusting. It’s only been a few hours! Save it for Week 2! Plus, with that rhythm, Little Danny will never make it out of here alive. The chafing!”

In an effectively awkward turn of physical events, Danny rolls over, succeeding in pinning her to the wall in the process.  His (hopefully not covered in man-juice) hands are held triumphantly aloft and needlessly close to her face, “No, you pervert, I found a rusty corner of this...this torture device masquerading as a bed, and viola! Sweet sweet freedom. Hand freedom, anyway. Here, give me yours.”

With a few deft motions, Danny releases her from the plastic tie that binds her, and slips both discarded zip ties under their mattress.

Mindy throws her arms around his head, hugging him in celebration,  “You are a genius, Danny Castellano. And a hero. A man among men!”

“All right, all right. Save the victory dance for when we get out of this nightmare.” He pats her shoulder, accidentally brushing the edge of her cheek with his fingertips in the process, “Go to sleep. At least we’ll have the use of both arms now. It won’t be comfortable, but it won’t be impossible either.”

She settles back in, thrilled to have full use of her arms, and Danny flip flops around, finally opting to curl up into a ball.  Mindy turns the opposite direction, her own bottom millimeters away from Danny's.  The earlier terror is back; the very real threat of bodily harm, of never seeing her friends or family; of spending her last few days of being a totally hot viable marriage prospect trapped with a grumbling man with overactive sebaceous glands. 

“I wonder what our funerals will be like,” she wonders aloud, startling Danny into falling halfway onto the floor.  

“You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were asleep.” Righting himself, he pants, “And anyway, that’s morbid. We’re going to get out of here.”

“I would never have pinned you as the optimist, Danny.”

He rolls onto his back, and she struggles to allow him another millimeter of space, “We’re going to be okay. If I thought we weren’t--“  He reaches for her hand, ends up with her wrist, and squeezes.  “I don’t know what I’d do if I thought this was the end for us.” Mindy pretends not to notice how his voice dips, because maybe he's more skeptical about their rescue than he wants to admit.

Mindy wraps her arms around her torso, hugging herself, “I know, right? I thought I would have so much more accomplished…when my Mom was my age, she had kids, and a perfect house, and a husband who adored her. I guess I’m just adrift, sometimes. I always thought that by the time I was…the age that you are now, minus eight, which I am not, but in ten years, I will be---“

“That is a hell of a word problem, Min.” Danny moves again, tilting his knees into the air. She can barely make out the outline of his features, but his eyes are bright.

“Anyway, I just always thought that by now I would have this life that belonged in the pages of a magazine—but instead, I eat vending machine food at least two meals a day and I think I have a mouse trapped in my microwave, and I haven’t seen the floor of my bedroom since Bush was in office. And I think it was the first Bush. Were there three?” Danny groans. “Don’t you ever just feel like we’re all just fumbling toward this unattainable nothingness, that we think is going to be the end all be all love of our lives but is really just---“

“No.” He says, definitively. Danny had always been a that’s the final word on that kind of guy. He was exactly the same way about refusing to allow the midwives to share their outdoor courtyard space for tai chi in the spring or installing a soda machine in the break room. Just no. No explanation, no reasoning, no logic. No.

“You don’t?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mindy. I do things that I like and I don’t do things that I don’t like. I’m not drifting. I’m a grown man who owns two apartments and my own parking space. Also, it is impossible to drift when you’re trapped like an animal in a six by eight foot cell.”

“Okay, fine, you’re not adrift. That’s just me. But you’re not happy with the way your life is, either.”

“I’m not not happy.”

“You are a constant party, Danny Castellano. Not not happy. That is a real endorsement, right there.” She pats his raised knee, “You deserve more than that.”

“That's what's wrong with people today.  Everybody walking around thinking they deserve everything.  Who says that you're supposed to get everything that you want?"

“Says everyone! Says Oprah! You get a life, you get a life, and YOU get a life!”

He folds his arms. “Unlike some people,” This feels pointed, “I’m trying to be a little careful.”

“Well, no matter how careful you are, someday someone is gonna wedge themselves right in there,” she gestures toward his heart, thumping on his sternum for emphasis, “despite your objections.”

“I don't object.  But maybe that's not what I want."

“You don't want to be happy?"

"Maybe what I need to be happy isn't another person." 

She shrugs, "I guess...but I still think that you do.  No matter what you say.  You still want to find your wedge."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because that is what gets every one of us up in the morning.  The idea that there is someone out there that can handle our bad breath, and our warts, and our daddy issues," It's hard to resist the Danny digs, "Plus, I know, because of every romantic comedy ever written.” She dismisses what she is sure is Danny’s eye roll with a wave of her hand, and adjusts herself along the line of his body, squaring up as closely as she can without touching, in an effort to capture some of his God-given warmth. Goosebumps gather along her upper arms, and she shivers.  "Jesus, it's freezing in here."

Danny turns to face her, and his breath puffs warm against her temple.  "Listen, I'm not suggesting...but, you know, body heat is a legitimate--"

"We could never."  Mindy shakes her head, her fingers finding the edge of the metal frame and gripping tightly.  "I couldn't look you in the eye if you were my big spoon tonight."

"What are you talking about?  You're cold, I'm warm.  We're solving a simple problem.  Let's not make it complicated."  If Mindy didn't know better, she'd think that Danny was pro-snuggling.  Danny Castellano, from the office, thought that cuddling was the natural solution to a problem.  What is this day.  In a sweeping motion, and despite her rather weak protest, he tucks his knees behind hers, and wrapping his arm firmly around her waist, drags her into his negative space.  He's easily seven hundred degrees of furnace strength heat, and much more firm than she expected. 

"And you know what else?"  Mindy offers, eager to fill the quiet with something that is not nestling in for a cold winter's nap with her grouchy co-worker.

"Hmm?" 

"On the whole happiness front:  you want it because you're still an old-fashioned guy, and that's what old-fashioned guys want.  You should be using words like dame, and ask me how the go is going, that's how old fashioned you are."

"You mean, like, how’s the go going, dame?"  Danny says it in a funny voice, like he’s a forties gangster, and for a second, her heart palpitates. An actual, honest to God, irregular beat of what was once a reliable organ, in relation to Danny Castellano.   _That is ridiculous._

"Yeah, like that." She says, quietly, positive that her pulse rate has elevated, at least fifty percent.  There must be some scientific evidence about how quickly one loses their mind when in a traumatic situation, and she's in the control group now. 

Danny mumbles blearily into her hair, "Eh, I think I'm a little more modern than that."

"Probably not." 

And in what has to be a combination of exhaustion, adrenaline crash, and Danny's bizarrely comforting arms, she succumbs to a dreamless sleep soon after.

* * *

 

 


	4. It's a Hard Knock Life

Morning light rockets through the tiny glass block window, announcing the second day of captivity in a more cheerful than necessary manner. Mindy’s always been good about waking up in strange places; medical residencies prepared her for that, but as everything about the past 24 hours marches back through her memory, filling in the blurred edges, she isn’t sure she’s ready to open her eyes.

Her mind reels with her most recent recollection: Cloaked in Darkness Danny wrapping his disturbingly muscular arms around her, like he meant it, even if it was to keep her from bitching about the cold. She inhales deeply, hoping to center herself more completely, and a scent reminiscent of apple pie cooling in an open window fills her nostrils. Her nose tickles with soft hair that’s covered her face while she’s slept, and as she opens her eyes, she realizes her cooling apple pie on a window sill also has a slight _eau de flop sweat_ , and the soft hair canoodling with her nose happens to belong to and line the nape of Danny Castellano’s neck.

Sometime in the night, they’ve shifted positions, and Mindy’s knee is shoved between his two bent legs, her skirt hiked immodestly over her pink lacy underwear. Her arm is thrown casually over his waist, her hand thrust under his oxford and t-shirt, resting on the trail of soft hair that leads from his belly button to,  _oh dear God_ , not, his belly button. _Sweet mother of crap I’m molesting Danny’s happy trail._

It takes only a few more seconds for the horror to set in, and in her haste to remove her face from his welcoming and definitely not gross smelling neck, her lips pucker, and she accidentally manages to kiss him, just a little peck that propels her backward.  Her kiss lands directly at the knob of his spine, where it peeks out from his shirt collar, and so help her, she can see a tinge of her long last lip color on his olive skin.  At this, Danny stirs. Of course he’s a light sleeper.

To his credit, he doesn’t comment, or make a cute little cutting remark about how she can barely keep her hands off of him, or in this case, her lips, and how he knew it all along. He just rolls over, stretches, and says, “Mornin’, Min.” Like it’s another day at the office, and not Day Two of the Manhattan Doctor Hostage Situation, and that this is absolutely how his usual Friday morning looks. Except for her morning never looks like this; Danny Castellano, dried blood over his eyebrow, hair sticking out in tufted horns, dark scruff filling in his square jawline, as he sits dazedly on the edge of her bed. (And technically, this cot is their bed, which is even crazier to think about, and Mindy briefly considers asking Danny to actually concuss her, just to get such ideas out of her head.)

Mindy’s stomach growls in response. “Do you think he’ll feed us today?” Her morning breath is disgusting, and she wonders what the chances are that she can convince their captor that toothbrushes are part of humane treatment.

Danny shrugs, and stands up, popping the kinks out of his neck and shoulders. “Looks like your wish is his command, Princess,” as he gestures toward a grocery bag that has appeared next to the locked door that leads out of their makeshift cell.

Mindy rips open the brown paper to find several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apples, bottles of water, toothbrushes, a tiny tube of travel toothpaste, and a newspaper. “Who is this guy? Boobs Radley?”

“It’s Boo.”

“I think it’s a little too early for pet names, Daniel.” Mindy dismisses him, grabbing for one of the sandwiches and a bottle of water.

“That wasn’t a pet—Never mind.” He mumbles, as he eyes the second sandwich suspiciously, as though it may rise up out of the sack and bite him or, “It’s probably poisoned.”

“It’s not poisoned.”

“Why wouldn’t it be poisoned?” Danny’s eyebrow arches.

Mindy looks around, hoping a valid, logical reason will jump off the floor and pop into her head, “Dead hostages are not going to get ransom money, okay? Just eat it, Danny.”

“No.” He crosses his arms, leaning back against the cot. Mindy doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to delve into all the reasons why Danny doesn’t want to eat something on a regular day, and with actual food staring her in the face, she has even less.

“If you waste away to nothing, he won’t like that either.”

“I can’t.” He looks as nauseous as the time that Mindy suggested that female physicians should be paid equally to males.

“Why not? Are you allergic to peanuts?” She’d seen him hoover up handfuls at a time at multiple cocktail parties for the practice, so it didn’t seem likely.

“No.”

“Are you allergic to polysyllabic responses?”

“God, Mindy. No.” He scratches at the back of his neck, “It’s just that when I was a kid—“

“Ooh, are you going to tell me another long winded tale of your hard scrabble childhood, Danny?”

“My hard scrab—No.” Danny rights himself, “And when I tell you the first long winded tale of my…childhood?”

“You didn’t. But I just assume that you will eventually weave me a gritty tale of a tiny man surviving in the tough streets of Staten.” Mindy downs a large swig of her water, “Were you a street urchin, Danny? A ragamuffin? A guttersnipe? I picture you on a street corner, maybe playing one of those old timey hurdy gurd---“

“A guttersnipe? Really?”

“I’m sorry, Danny, please tell me your peanut butter hatred origin story, in which you were not a snipe of any kind, but God as your witness you vowed---” She shakes her fist at the sky.

Danny rolls his eyes. “After my dad left--”

Mindy grabs his wrist, “Wait, are you opening up to me right now?”

“No. But you asked a question and it’s rude not to answer.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just, my mom had to work all the time, after my dad left, and she didn’t want me to turn on the stove, so we had limited options, you know? We couldn’t really afford cold cuts all the time, and we’d get tired of cereal, so we’d get the…” Danny pauses, “Combination peanut butter and jelly, you know, the kind in the jar, together?”

Mindy shudders, “Ugh, gross.”

“I sort of made a vow that I was going to work as hard as I could so that I would never have to eat peanut butter and jelly again. So yeah, I’m not eating this.”

She can picture child Danny diligently making the sandwiches for himself and his floppy haired little brother, and she can’t pretend she doesn’t feel a tiny twinge of melancholy. It makes him seem downright human. “That is the most depressing thing I have ever heard and I AM A HOSTAGE, Danny.”

He blushes, and she knows that he’ll be checked out for the next little while. He’s not a sharer by nature. He might not speak out loud again for a week, really.

However, none of this has affected Mindy’s appetite in any way, and she gulps down half of her sandwich in seconds, grape jelly landing by her ear in the carnage.

“Are you five, why can’t you eat like a normal person?”

“I think this is your hanger talking, Danny.”

“That is not a WORD. It is a word, actually, but not the way that you are using it. Which I am almost positive makes me angrier.”

Okay, the emotional shut down is happening out loud today. “I think you meant to say “hangrier”. But it takes a big man to admit it.” She pats his hand, “We’re having cyclical arguments here, Castellano. Please eat. Your low blood sugar in combination with my winning personality—we’ll kill each other before the peanut butter poison can even infiltrate your blood stream.”

“I’m fine. I don’t need it. I’ll eat the apples. God knows you won’t go for fruit.” Danny smiles, rubbing one of the apples on his shirt front and taking a loud crunching bite. “Um, Mindy, while we’re opening up about things?”

“Yeah?”

Danny pretends to be very, very interested in the fabric of his pants, and he traces the nap with his fingernail, “Did you—not that it matters, but, did you kiss my neck this morning? I could have sworn—“

Mindy can feel the heat building from her chest, spreading over her neck and face. “Never. I would NEVER.”

“Okay, okay, I totally imagined it. Forget I asked.” He shakes his head, and gives her a half smile.

“I wonder when he brought this bag down.” Mindy changes the subject, swiftly. “It’s kind of creepy that he might have been, like, watching us sleep. I mean, it’s all kind of creepy anyway, but that almost takes the creepy cake. It’s a violation of—“

“Shut up and eat my peanut butter sandwich.” He interrupts, reaching over to flick the jelly off her cheek.

Nothing in her stomach shifts and snakes down to her groin.  Nothing.  Totally does not happen.   She also chooses to ignore the surge of electricity that his light touch sends through her body, and she definitely doesn’t want to acknowledge the fleeting look in Danny’s eye; the one that seemed hungry for something other than a brown bag breakfast.  Imaginary everything around their basement prison this morning. 

“I was thinking about what you said last night, too, Danny.”

“What’s that? I said a lot of things. I’m full of insight.”

“Ha ha, very funny. Just about you know, feeling like I deserve to be happy. I think you might be kind of right.”

“How so?”

“I mean, if I had it all, where would I put it?”

Danny hoots with laughter, almost choking on his apple.


	5. When We Are Engulfed In Flames

Mindy twirls in a circle, the sugar rush of her high fructose corn syrup breakfast zooming through her cells. “Come dance with me, Danny. Come on.”

He looks up from the newspaper, which she knows he can’t be possibly be reading anymore, but he continues to hold, probably to look busy so he doesn’t have to interact with her. “I am not dancing.”

“Don’t pretend that dancing is against your religion. You had tickets to the ballet just last week.”

“I had a friend in the performance. Someone I used to—“

“Ex-girlfriend?”

“No.” He turns the page. Danny is clearly at a new level of annoying, where he’s being purposefully obtuse.

“Are you going to tell me who was in the performance?”

“I don’t see what bearing it has on our current predicament.”

“The bearing is that I WANT TO BE ENTERTAINED and if you don’t entertain me, you’re going to have a predicament.” She stands with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently.

“You’re a child.” He shakes his head, and says quietly, “It was someone I used to dance with.”

“Ex-squeeze me? You used to dance? As in Lord of The?”

“It was ballet, but yes.” She can tell this is as far as she’s getting on this subject, but it was a fun jaunt down Not Really That Much of Memory Lane nonetheless. It gives her at least fifteen seconds of picturing Danny in tights and a tutu that she wouldn’t have had otherwise, so that’s sweet.

She returns to her twirling, and pirouettes over to Danny on the cot. “I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so—“ She collapses on top of him, toppling into his newspaper; sugar rush turning into full on sugar crash, “Scared.”

“All right, Jessie Spano, that’ll be enough of that. You crushed the Business section.”

“How do you know Jessie Spano, Old Man?”

“I’m in my thirties, Mindy. Saved By the Bell was a staple of my Saturday mornings.” Danny pushes her off of him, and she lands, without grace, at his feet. Anyone looking at their tableau from the outside would think she was about to---

“You totally pounded it to Jessie Spano and her mom jeans, didn’t you?”

Danny blushes. “Mindy.”

“Slater, in his singlet?”

“Mindy.” He folds the paper and sits back on their bed. “Quiet time now.”

“Tell me a story, Danny. I’m bored.” She whines.

He expels a long, impatient breath. “I’m out of stories.” He had told her, max, three stories in the thirty-six hours they’d been there. It wasn’t like she had him reciting her Harry Potter from memory. The sigh, Mindy finds, is unnecessary.

“Make one up.” She pokes at his side. She’s already read the newspaper cover to cover, and she’d listened with rapt attention as Danny delivered a fifteen minute diatribe about the death of print media immediately following. He had also rejected her previous suggestion that they tear out sale ads and photographs to decorate their cell, and they were both surprised to find that there's no article with the title _I_ _mportant Manhattan Gynecologists Stolen In Night_ detailing their plight. Which means a myriad of things that are not great for them, including that there is a possibility that no one knows that they’re gone yet. She needs Danny to distract her, even if that means he has to fill the silence with his own noise.

“I am not your own personal wind up toy, Mindy. Sometimes I just like to sit in silence.”

Mindy glares at him for a few moments and changes tacks, “When was the last time you took a vacation?”

“I don’t know. Probably the last time travel agents were relevant.”

“What about your honeymoon? Did you guys take one?” Knowing Danny, he took his ex-wife to Coney Island, and that was the moment she knew that she’d made a terrible life-long mistake.

“Of course we did. “

“But you don’t want to talk about it?” This is a redundant question, because one could always assume that Danny didn’t want to talk about something.

“I don’t care, Mindy. We went to Bora Bora. Christina really wanted to stay in those huts, on the water; she had friends who had gone. It was beautiful. Bright blue sky, white sand beaches. Very peaceful.”

“You hated it.” Mindy says, satisfied with how well she knows Danny’s hatred of all things peaceful. She’s heard the sounds of the docks emanating from his office while he does paperwork, and she’s seen him sleep through three fire alarms at the hospital because he found the alarm bells quote “soothing”.

“I hated it.” Danny smiles. “How did you know?”

“You hate everything.”

“Okay, lucky guess.”

“Fine, you hate most things. But I know what you hated most about it.”

“Enlighten me.” The crooked grin is spreading, despite himself, and he nudges her with his shoulder.

“It was quiet and you don’t do quiet. You like the sounds of the city more than you like silence. You don’t really like water, because it seems like it could swallow you whole, and you are not into giving up that kind of power or control. Your wife, though, she loved all of it.”

“I don’t hate that stuff.” Danny’s voice gets a little quiet, and Mindy isn’t sure if it’s how near she is to the truth, or the mention of his wife that does it.

“Eh, you probably don’t. But you think it’s easier to dislike things that you wish you could have.” Mindy shrugs, “I do that with other people’s purses all the time.”  Danny rubs at the skin near his wrist, and she knows that she’s too close to something, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. “Speaking of which, do you have your wallet with you?”

She knows that he does, by now, she’s memorized every bit of him, including the outline of his wallet in his left hand back pants pocket. (She will not mention other outlines she’s memorized. But Danny may hang left. Thank you and goodnight!)

“Yeah. Why?”

“Give it. You can learn a lot about a person from what they keep in their wallet.” He relinquishes it more quickly than she thought he would, but then again, it’s been two days. It was only a matter of time before she had him bending to her will.

Danny obediently lays out the contents of his wallet, as if he’s dealing her a hand of solitaire. Mindy mentally catalogs his NYC library card, gym membership, Frequent Bagel Card, Jam of the Month Club—“How much jam does one guy need, Danny?”, and the photo of his mother, who looks exactly like what Mindy would have imagined if she’d ever thought to picture who or what created Danny Castellano. She had no prior proof that he wasn’t a robot or a pod person or Mork from Ork, so the presence of the tiny, smiling dark haired lady in his billfold is exactly right.

He looks up, sheepish, as he rediscovers the tiny folded photograph between a condom from what Mindy assumes to be 1994 and a laminated copy of his medical license, and Mindy wants to knock the whole thing out of his hands, she’s so desperate to see. “Is that—“

Danny nods. “I forget it’s here, sometimes."

“How come you keep it?” Something in his eyes tells her not to pry, not to rip what has to be the key to so many unanswered questions from his hands, so she doesn’t. She really, really wants to, but she doesn’t. She chalks this up to character development, from her days in (mostly) solitary confinement.

“It reminds me not to let it happen again.” She isn’t sure which part he’s trying to prevent, but she figures in the absolutist mind of Danny Castellano, _all of it_ is probably the most accurate assessment.

“She used to pack my lunches, you know.” How would she know? Danny lets out personal details once a year, never too many at once.

“Your Ma?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Not my Mom. She worked three jobs to support us. When was she going to pack my lunches? On the LIE?”

“Calm down, Castellano, who packed?”

“Christina.”

“That doesn’t seem…like her.” Mindy has no idea what is like or unlike Danny’s ex-wife, all she knows is that she left Danny a broken shell of a man, and everything before that was a mystery.  He was probably much taller before Christina got a hold of him and wrecked him.

“It used to be.” She isn’t sure if he meant for that to come out wistfully, but that’s how it sounded, and he gets a far-off look in his eye. “She put little notes—“ he shakes his head, “Anyway, it wasn’t always a nightmare, being with her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Danny glances down at his hands, settled on the tops of his knee-caps. “If it was, why would I still miss her?”

Mindy considers her options, and bursting through the wall Fred Flinstone-style to avoid the awkward tension doesn’t appear to be doable, presently, so instead, she asks, “Do you think you would ever want to get married again?”

“I don’t know.” He creases the photo again, running his nail along the fold, effectively sealing it closed, “I thought I met the right girl, I loved her, she broke my heart. I don’t know if I want to go through all that again.”

“Just because one manic pixie dream girl broke your heart doesn’t mean they all will.” Mindy briefly wonders if fondling his under navel area a second time, in broad daylight, will be more or less terrifying than witnessing Danny baring his soul. She half-heartedly reaches out toward his abdomen, but he speaks, and it startles her into aborting her clearly misguided mission.

“I think the worst part is, I think I would have taken her back. Like, I can compartmentalize pretty well, and I think I was willing to just forget that I ever saw anything that day, if it meant my life—my wife—didn’t change.”

“But you couldn’t do it?”

“She didn’t want to stay, Mindy.” Once, Mindy had seen Danny come close to falling apart, after a particularly difficult delivery, a patient with pre-eclampsia and HELPP syndrome, and the baby was a stillbirth. She had seen the haunted look in Danny’s eyes, like he recognized the losses and maybe he was thinking of the distraught parents, and maybe a little bit, he was thinking about the things that he didn't have anymore. It wasn’t like he ever would have told her what was going through his mind, but she knew that it was about more than just an unfortunate situation in childbirth. And here he is again, looking haunted, and here she is, gaping at him like he’s an animal in the zoo.

She looks down at the collection of cards that make up the sum total of Daniel Alan Castellano (his medical license told the tale, and he didn’t elaborate on why everyone else thought his middle name was Mussolini) and gestures, “It’s a full house!”

Danny swiftly inserts everything neatly back into his wallet, and lays it in the corner by his watch, which he had taken off earlier in a snit about not needing to know what time it was anymore.

Looking at her like they’re once again strangers, he picks up the newspaper and turns back to the sports section. “Can you believe the Knicks?”


	6. Starry Starry Night

It’s almost evening again before Mindy finds that she’s brave enough to speak. Something about Danny’s eerie silence, and the robotic way that he’d consumed his dinner time ration of peanut butter and jelly made it impossible for her marvel aloud at how quickly he’d abandoned his sandwich related principles; it all seemed unnecessarily cruel.

For the sake of solidarity (People eating food they don’t want to eat because it triggers bad memories, unite!—It is too long a slogan for the billboard, but it could shrink to fit), Mindy even munched half-heartedly on one of the apples.

Mindy putters around after dinner, brushing her teeth, washing her face, straightening up their meager collection of possessions. Dinner hasn’t given her the same sugar high as breakfast, and with Danny in a more introspective mood than usual, sleep sounds positively heavenly.

She gives Danny his privacy as he avails himself of the facilities, and forces him to hum the theme to the _Golden Girls_ while she does the same. She climbs into bed, curling into a ball, not even caring where her limbs are in relation to Danny’s. She’s less worried about their arms or legs accidentally touching, and more concerned that she’s going to be charged with gross sexual imposition for wherever her roving hand happens to end up while she sleeps.

And to be even more honest, she doesn’t want to know why her hand (and her subconscious) is so interested in Danny’s weird body, but she knows, to the depths of her being, that the evening cannot end with either still gripping his unsuspecting package in the light of day.

“Maybe we should switch sides of the bed.” She suggests, in a small voice, and Danny’s head jerks up.

“Oh no, I don’t think so.” He takes a defensive posture. _Okay, here we go again.  Round Seventeen of Bickering You Could Have Done Without._

“I’m tired, Danny, and I want to go to sleep. Why can’t we switch?”

“Because the man should always sleep closest to the door.” Experience dictates that Danny is ramping up to a rant about the male and female gender roles, made especially evident by the unnatural way his eyebrows hook, up near his hairline. “It’s about protection.”

“The man?” Mindy braces herself for whatever sexist propaganda is about to spew forth from the mouth of her co-worker.

“The male half of the coup—“

“We are not a couple, Danny.” She protests, even though they are squabbling like some old marrieds.

“Are there two of us? We’re a couple.” He gestures to Mindy, and back to himself, looking very self-satisfied. “A couple … Of people.”

“Ugh, you should take that act on the road, grandpa.”

Danny deftly ignores her irritation and continues with his train of thought, whatever track it’s actually on. “Besides, I was thinking that we could use the newspaper to keep warm tonight.”

Her stomach drops. No cozy doctor hostages tonight? Wait, she didn’t like cozy doctor hostages. Did she? “That’s offensive in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

“Offensive? It’s practical.”

“It’s hobo-ist. Or something.”

“I’m pretty sure the word hobo is offensive to the homeless, and anyway, you’re reaching. Use the paper for a blanket so you don’t freeze to death. Your legs are bare, for heaven’s sake.”

“Stop looking at my legs, perv.”

“Stop grabbing my belly button, handsy.”

 _Oh, so there it is._   Her grabby chickens are coming home to roost.  She swallows, “About that…”

Danny waves his hand, “You were cold, you burrowed. No big deal. But did you maybe want to—“

“I could never.” She says, aghast. She doesn’t even know what he’s suggesting, but it sounds like something that she should never participate in, whatever it is.

“You could never what?” He starts to unbutton his dress shirt, eyes shining with bemusement.  She knows she's acting schizophrenic, operating only on what some very sexually confused voices are telling her, and she worries that Danny might be clued in to her mania, too.

Mindy recoils in horror, “Nope, no, not going to happen. There will be no naked cozy doctor hostage time tonight.”  _Mark me down as scared and horny, Dan._

Danny peers at her quizzically, as though she has four heads and is speaking in tongues. “What are you talking about? Are you having some kind of delayed concussive reaction?” He drops the placket of his shirt front, and peers into her pupils. He’s close enough that she can see he has a breadcrumb stuck in his two days’ worth of beard growth. And that beard growth has a tiny patch of silver, right on the bottom of his chin. “Do you have blurred vision? Headache? Any dizziness?”

Mindy pushes his hand away from her face, “Stop doctoring me, Danny, I’m fine. It’s just getting—suffocating in here.”

He withdraws, “All I was trying to say, you giant nutjob, is that you should take my shirt, too. I don’t need it, and you’re barely half dressed, as per usual.” He gestures to her skirt, and bare legs.

“Don’t call me giant.” She protests, weakly.

“Why are you being so weird about this? I’ve seen you knock over small children to get to frozen yogurt samples. What exactly is your reluctance to take my shirt?” His nice gesture is quickly fading into a begrudging one.

What was happening here? Clearly, the small space, combined with the lack of good nutrition, and the previous knock on the head are all adding up to an extremely skewed perspective on Danny’s motivations. He’s only trying to avoid another embarrassing morning situation in which he is sexually harassed six different ways from Sunday. “Sorry, I didn’t…no, that’s a really good idea. And it’s very generous of you to offer.”

Danny removes his shirt, and hands it over. It’s warm, as if it’s just come out of the dryer, still managing to smell like fabric softener and that wholesome apple pie scent she remembers from the morning. Danny crosses his arms, in only his undershirt, tucking his hands under his biceps. “No problem.”

Mindy buttons herself into his blue checkered shirt, hunkering down on her portion of the mattress. They sit shoulder to shoulder, Danny still stubbornly closest to the door, staring at the four too close walls. She wishes they would have saved a section of the paper to read, or at least that Danny would have agreed to re-enact the police blotter with her.

The sun slips quietly under the horizon, bathing their room in a dusky pink. “Hey.” She nudges his arm with her index finger.

He looks down at her, his arms still crossed. “What?”

“How come you don’t ever ask me about me?”

Danny considers for a moment, “Because I already know you.”

“How is that even possible? You know me?” She huffs, “You don’t know me.”

“I pay attention, Mindy. I know you.” He’s definitely mentally preparing a list of all the things that he knows, about to deluge her in the Mindy facts that he’s been collecting throughout the years, but she’s stuck on something else.

“You pay attention to me?”

He nods, “Well, you’re right there, in my face all the time. Live and in color. I couldn’t not pay attention to you if I tried. And man, have I tried.” She imagines him at his desk, wearing a blindfold and earmuffs, humming to himself when she talks at staff meetings. Then she wonders which drawer he keeps the blindfold in. _Damnit. What is wrong with this basement?_

“What do you pay attention to, exactly?”

“I hear a lot of things, Mindy. I see a lot of things. Some good, some bad.”

“Well, you’re no bucket full of puppies yourself, I’ll tell you that.” With Danny, sometimes the best defense is a good offense, especially if it references baby animals.

“Okay.” He holds up his hand to shush her, “I’m trying to say a nice thing here.”

She nods, “Proceed.”

Danny smiles, that funny half smile, his shoulders relaxing. “Seriously, though, usually I’m just amazed at how quickly you can adapt to change. It’s incredible.”

“You really are super afraid of change, aren’t you?” Mindy asks, as the room fades finally into darkness.

“I’m not that afraid.”

She doesn’t see him coming, but she feels him, lingering in front of her; his breath, peanut buttery and sticky sweet.

“What are you doing, Danny?”

He takes a sharp breath, “I think I might kiss you now.” He sounds as surprised as she is. She’s never heard his voice quite like this—soft, and low, and charged with--

“What’s taking you so long?” She demands.

“You.”

She had always thought that if Danny Castellano tried to kiss her, she’d at least object, semi-strenuously. But that isn’t the case, in the here and now, and she’s surprised to find that she has that clenchy, deep and warm feeling, the one that makes her feel invincible, and desirable, and like this is very, very right, somehow. Except: Why isn’t he kissing her yet?

“Do you feel invincible too?” It comes out dreamy and gauzy sounding, as though she’s been sleep walking.

“What?” He pulls back, just enough to be too far, and far enough that his pretty, plush mouth taunts her.

“Never mi—“ Danny efficiently closes the gap, soft lips covering hers.

She’s always known that Danny is competitive, that he likes to be right, and that he needs to feel like he’s winning, at all costs. Danny’s kisses are exactly like that; precise and driven and tenacious. He bites and tugs at her lips with his teeth, pulling and tasting and teasing with each ragged breath. He refuses to relinquish any control, and while that is usually what drives her crazy, this time it is exactly the right kind of crazy. His hands cup her face, guiding her lips back to his any time she might try to extract herself; just to allow her heart beat time to catch up with her breathing.

Danny stops, suddenly, his own breath coming in slow rasps, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this is a mistake.” He mumbles into her mouth, his hands still trailing down her arms.

“No.”

“No?” He pulls back, half amused.

“It’s not a mistake. A, This is much too small a space for us to add mortified former kissing partners to the mix, so buck up and deal, mister. You kissed me. No take backs.”

“No take backs.” Danny repeats, as his eyes flick down to her lips. “What’s B?”

Mindy smiles, a sudden confidence building, “And B, you really, really liked it.” She leans in, brushing her lips against his, and deepening the kiss until Danny makes a little growling noise into her mouth.

He breaks free and forges a trail to her earlobe, sending volumes of tiny shivers coursing throughout her body. Dragging his fingers coarsely over her neck, he unbuttons his shirt, then her blouse. She moans as he moves down the column of her throat, nipping and sucking and licking his way down to her breasts, dropping tiny warm kisses on her rib cage before he unclasps her bra (Mindy thanks the ten avatars of Vishnu that she had the presence of mind to wear a front clasping bra to a hostage situation) and takes her nipple into his mouth.

It seems to Mindy that there’s a good possibility that none of this is real, and that she’s hovering outside of her body, watching Danny’s dark head and swollen lips dance along her torso. She closes her eyes, then, thinking about how much she wants to be kissing him, and that it still feels an awful lot like how it is to want to kill him. This is Danny, and even when it hurts, it still feels entirely right.

She throws her leg over Danny’s, climbing into his lap, continually chasing the sugary sweetness of his mouth and tongue. His tiny gold crucifix, something she’s never noticed before, glints against the patch of dark hair on his chest, and she fervently hopes that Danny’s God can’t see into dimly lit basement cells or the inner thoughts of Hindu girls.

Danny clutches at her ass, bumping her nose with his head as he rises to kiss her, and he freezes, eliciting a groan of complaint from her throat. The stairs rumble with activity, and the basement door bursts open with a metallic clang.

The silhouette of their captor looms against the door frame, and Danny instinctively tightens his grip on her hips. He presses his mouth to the top of her head, whispering, “We’ll be okay.  Just breathe.”

And then all she sees is stars.


	7. He's Slipping 'Em Bread, Dig?

Through her ringing ears and her blurred vision, Mindy can only connect the dots of the violence that plays out in front of her. She barely hears the pounding of fists against flesh, the cracking of bone on bone, Danny’s guttural objections to both. Her view is only black and grey; she cannot see the crimson blood as it rushes down Danny’s face, or the bruises bloom purple on his torso. She deciphers “home” and “go” in male voices, volleying over her head, and the only way she can think to dull the pain in her own head is to squeeze her eyes closed. Maybe when she opens them, she’ll have gone home, too.

* * *

 

“Hey, Min? You okay?” Danny’s broken voice echoes from an opposite corner, and she can’t see him from where she lays. The sweet cloying scent of their captor’s cologne still hangs in the dank air, and she coughs in an attempt to rid it from her lungs. “Min?” Danny calls out again, his voice a little stronger, more alarmed, on his second attempt.

Mindy’s stomach flips and lunges, an unfortunate combination that raises the bile in her throat, “I’m okay.” She performs a routine limb and vitals check; ten fingers, ten toes, nothing hurt but her head. She sits up, dazed, her shirts still unbuttoned, but her hands mercifully free.

“Did he…” Danny doesn’t finish as a dragging sound approaches from her left. Danny’s soft hair suddenly butts up against her elbow. “I finished first in the Worm at my sixth grade break dancing competition.” He says, as if that is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how he’s appeared at her side. “Are you okay?”

Not many men have made the effort to check on her well-being with their hands literally tied behind their back, and their ankles bound, but Danny has. She figures that if she now has to hold other men to this standard, it will be utterly impossible to find a date. _Damnit, Danny_. “Are you? It sounded like…”

It had sounded like Danny took the brunt of whatever happened while she was knocked out, and even in the dark, she can tell that his cuts are freshly bleeding. “I’m fine, Min.” He says, shaking her off. “It’s nothing that won’t heal.”

She wants to tell him to stop being brave, but she needs him to supply enough for the both of them. “Maybe he didn’t like that your zip tie was off?”

“No, I don’t think he did.” Danny winces, “I’m sorry, Mindy.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I took them off in the first place.” Danny’s eyes glint in the moonlight, and Mindy has to physically stop herself from reaching out to push his hair off his forehead, “I don’t think I’m going to have the same luck with these.” He holds up his wrists, struggling against the tape.

Mindy displays her two free hands, “Two dainty wrists, at your service.” That came out wrong. “At least he didn’t duct tape our mouths.”

Danny smiles, and Mindy braces for the impact of what she is sure will be a joke about duct taping hers, “Thank God.”

_Huh,_ she thinks. It doesn’t make much sense to her why Danny is bound like a sarcophagus and she’s wrist-loose and fancy free, but she assumes that it’s because he put up more of a fight, and also, he’s still kind of a dickhead. She assists Danny in achieving a sitting position and uses some of their bottled water to clean out the largest and bloodiest gash on his face. “Is this all right?” She pats his injury with the hem of his dress shirt, “I wish I had a needle; I could stitch this right up. Make you pretty again.”

Danny nudges her shoulder with his nose. He’s almost exactly like having a horse now. “Hey.”

“Mmm?”

“I’m sorry we got interrupted before.”

“Yeah?”  She's grateful for the darkness, so that Danny can't know how deeply she's blushing.  

“I don’t think he liked that I was kissing you, either.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he said, ‘Don’t kiss her’ as he punched me repeatedly in the head and neck.”

“That’ll do it.” Mindy stops for a minute, “Did you like that you were kissing me?”

“Did you?”

“Did you?”

“Did—“ Danny shakes his head to keep from continuing down this same path, “You know what? I really did.”

Even with two shirts, goose bumps ripple across her arms. “Me too.”

It’s enough, putting that into the atmosphere, and not having a meteor come crashing down onto her. She liked kissing Danny Castellano and Danny liked kissing her, and now it feels like eighth grade after an impromptu game of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

She glances at Danny, uncomfortably bound, bent into a zig zag near their cot. “Let me at least try to get you out of that.”

Mindy scoots down the length of Danny’s legs, concentrating on the tape on his ankles. She pulls and twists and cajoles until she finally resorts to using her teeth to tear at his restrictions. With only minor dental damage, she is able to free his legs within minutes. She goes to work on his wrists, but the tape there is twisted and doubled. Her canines aren’t prepared for that kind of adhesive work.

Danny stands, hobbling toward the cot. She knows that he’s more injured than he lets on, from the tentative way he settles onto the cot, holding his rib cage; the wince as her weight shifts their mattress. Groaning, he stretches his taped arms over her head, settling them at her midsection, without prior authorization.

“Comfortable?” He murmurs into her neck, the combination of his warm breath and beard growth prickling against her exposed skin.

She nods, afraid to say much more. Her head pounds, and she worries that she really shouldn’t allow herself to truly close her eyes. But Danny is so warm, and his breathing so rhythmic, she can feel the pull of sleep gripping her more and more strongly. Danny pushes his hips forward, inching ever closer; his body heat enveloping her. “You are a human space heater, Castellano.”

"I aim to please, Min.” Reflexively, she starts to object, but when she really thinks about it, Danny doesn’t have a history of reveling in her unhappiness. It’s always how she’s pictured him, but she realizes that throughout her random breakups and bad deliveries and unfortunate run-ins with food truck drivers, he’d always been supportive in a stilted, lack of social skills kind of way. He’d get her a snack out of the vending machine without being asked, or bring her a sandwich when he’d order his own lunch, or thump her on the back like she’d just pinned the heavy-weight wrestler or scored the winning hockey goal. If she adds it all up, the results are Danny speak for “feel better”. Even here, he keeps her company for longer than she can tell he wants, or than he’s comfortable, but even still, he seemed to have the tendency to be the one who picked up an alarming amount of pieces for someone who could barely tolerate her.

“I’m glad it was you, and not Jeremy, that I got taken with.”

He pats her hand with both of his, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We would have lit this place up, sure, but we’d have run out of things to talk about by hour three. He’s always calling me barmy and frankly I think he’s kind of a douchebag sometimes. Plus he used to call his erections 'biggies' and that was super creeptastic."

Danny laughs, “I’m blowing past that last thing. But you think I’m a douchebag. In fact, it wasn’t that many days ago that you called me Dr. Douchebag. In front of a patient.”

“I didn’t understand you before. Now I understand you.”

“I almost don’t want to know, do I?”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, until the realization strikes.

“Oh my God.” Mindy gasps.

“We work together.”

“We hate each other.”

“This is never going to work.”

“We might die.”

“So you’re saying it will work until the point in which we cease to exist?”

“I’m saying that we might die, so seize the fucking day. Or the ass, as the case may be.”

“Sorry about that. It’s a reflex—“

“That’s your big move, isn’t it? The butt grab? Note to self: Danny Castellano is an ass man. And mama will provide, in spades.” She pauses, “Okay, okay, that got away from me. But you get my drift.”

“So, does this mean…”

“We’re doing this.”

“This is happening.” Danny hooks his leg around hers, his mouth directly against her ear.

Her voice lowers, relieved that she can’t see his face, “It’s all happening.”


	8. Base and Balls

The brown paper bag reappears with the sunrise, containing the same food rations as the previous day, and a current newspaper. Mindy and Danny pour over its contents, and Mindy finds their article after a few minutes of combing the pages. “Hey, we’re in this!”

Danny crunches his apple, peering over her shoulder. “Finally.”

 

 

> _Manhattan gynecologists Dr. Mindy Lahiri and Dr. Daniel Castellano were abducted late Thursday evening from their Tribeca medical practice, Shulman and Associates, NYPD detectives report. Supervising physician Dr. Marc Shulman called police after finding the office ransacked and neither doctor reported for work on Friday. NYPD cannot comment further on suspects or negotiations at this time._

“Negotiations, Danny. They know we’re here. Liam Neeson is going to bust through that window any minute now.” She pushes his chest in excitement.

He doesn’t seem to be as jazzed as she is, to her chagrin, and nothing close to happiness registers on his face.

He limps back over to the bed, disposing of his apple core in the paper bag. “Great, I’ll be over here, hoping my bones magically knit back together. Wake me up when he gets here.”

* * *

 

She lets Danny sleep undisturbed as long as she can stand it, but she’s read the same article about something called ISIS seventy-six times and she still has no idea what it’s talking about. She laments that Kim Kardashian didn’t have the forethought to do something newsworthy the night before.

She sits on the edge of the bed, watching him doze, in a strictly academic manner, thank you.

His face is slack, mouth open just slightly, and she wonders if he’d notice if she just kissed him, a little.

Clearly the blow she took to the head was harder than she thought. Instead of bothering him, she huddles behind him, winding down for her own mid-day nap.

* * *

 

They sleep away most of their daylight, which is a strategy they are beginning to realize might be valid, to combat boredom and fatigue and as an added bonus, avoid further awkward interactions, post-kissing.

The damn kissing.

Maybe she shouldn’t be studying him this intently in the light of day, searching his face for clues, like his nose is going to tell her how long this has been going on, or that his stupid perfect square jaw might know if he has feelings for her.

The things they said in the dark, they don’t seem to be repeating in the daylight, and she’s worried that she’s misinterpreted their conversation completely.

“Do I have something…” Danny rubs at his lip, at any phantom jelly that might still be clinging.

She looks away, “You got it. Right there. Perfect.”

* * *

 

The sun is about to set on their third day and she’s exhausted herself listening for the sound of sirens, or the arrival of a SWAT team, to no avail. “Liam has ten more minutes and then I’m chalking today up to a loss.” Mindy makes her third origami crane out of the paper, and lines it up with her other creations: stars, flowers, and a heart that she can make beat, by placing her index finger and thumb in the folds.

Danny lies prostrate nearby on the dirty floor, no longer terribly concerned about microbes and infection, his bound hands crossed over his chest like a mummy. “I could never do that stuff. I didn’t ever have the patience.”

“Danny Castellano, impatient? I can’t even picture it.” She teases, these the first words Danny’s said in hours. “I spent the summer at sleep away camp. You would not believe the amount of origami you perform. That and blow jobs.”

He sputters, “Holy shit.” He struggles into a sitting position, and Mindy is awed by his core strength. She offers him her hands to help him stand, and he doesn’t let go as they walk toward their bed.

They settle in, and this time, Mindy doesn’t turn to face the wall. Danny swipes gently at a piece of hair that’s fallen into her face, “I’m sorry I’ve been kind of...not here today. I think that everything is just finally getting to me.”

“It’s okay.” She’s grateful that the room is dim, because sometimes it’s impossible to make eye contact with him, for all the intensity that he can manage in just one look. “I just thought maybe you thought…”

“He told me that he’d kill me if I touched you again, Mindy.”  Danny blurts, and it takes a full thirty seconds for it to register with her.

“But last night—“

“I’m not trying to get out of anything, I’m not, but—“

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Danny. Are you breaking up with me?”

“No, I’m not breaking—When were we dating? We made out. Once.”

“You said THIS IS HAPPENING. What is _this_ , Danny?”

“This—me and you, kissing. It happened.”

“It wasn’t past tense when you said it. And then there was real snuggling, not just like huddled together for warmth snuggling.”

“I liked the snuggling. And I really liked the kissing.”

“I know, you told me that last night. Or were you lying about that too?”

“I wasn’t—Mindy, please.”

“Before, you said he told you not to kiss me.”

“He said a lot of things. You were passed out.”

“What else did he say, Danny?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want either of us to get hurt.”

“How would he even know what we do down here?”

“How did he know last night?”

“Are we being watched?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, Mindy. Please. Let’s just—“

She couldn’t describe what is happening in her head if she had a gun to it, but she wasn’t going to let him coward his way out of this. Whatever this is. She wants to be the one to make him come undone, not the other way around.

Before her head knows exactly what her hands are doing, she’s at his belt buckle, pulling down his zipper, exposing his semi-hard erection. “Hello, sir.” She salutes.

Danny makes an unintelligible sound, expelling a whoosh of air. “Mindy.”

She looks up, challenging him. “Object now, or forever hold your peace, Castellano.”

The air is still, and the only sound comes from above them, a far-off action movie playing in the distance. Danny nods, slowly, and leans back in consent.

She starts, slowly enough for him to squirm against her hands, grazing her mouth along his shaft, lightly licking up to the head. She takes him into her hands, squeezing slightly, tugging and flicking her tongue against the bundle of nerves under his frenulum. She sucks and teases, winding her way back down to his balls, taking each one into her mouth, and finding the area between his testicles and the base, massaging it with her tongue. Danny stiffens and moans in pleasure. “Oh, that's the ticket.”  

Mindy sits back on her heels, taking a pull from her water, and returns to the head of his ever-hardening cock. She knows that the chill from the water will aid in his pleasure, and from his reaction as she takes him back into her mouth, skimming him with her teeth, his satisfaction is apparent. “Stop, stop.” He puffs, lightly tugging on her hair, “Please. I give.”

She isn't sure, and she doesn't want to gloat, but she's almost positive she just got Danny Castellano to cry uncle.  “Hmm?”

“The condom, in my wallet, it’s not that old, I promise.” He’s definitely having difficulty forming words, and Mindy tingles with the knowledge.

“What makes you think we’re having sex now, Danny?”

He sits up, his eyes dark and focused, “Please.”

She rises from her knees, kissing his lips on the way. She finds the condom, expiration date less questionable, and rolls it on, distracting him as she provides careful suction to his balls. He whimpers slightly, his tied hands reaching for her shoulder, to guide her up to his mouth.

Mindy sheds her pink underwear as they kiss, shrugging out of her shirt and bra. They reconvene on the center of the mattress, her legs hooked over his, as she lowers herself onto his cock. He kisses along a narrow strip of her skin, and up to her jaw, as he thrusts and grinds against her. “We’re making do with what we got,” He puffs into the hollow of her neck, working his way back up to her lips. “But we have to be quiet.” His last word is a warning, and Mindy has to keep herself from moaning into his mouth as he grazes her clit with the set of his fingertips.

Danny’s sweat is salty and sweet, all at the same time, and she runs her teeth lightly over his earlobe. Danny’s breath hitches as they rock against each other, building a steady rhythm. She misses his hands, and their expert abilities, but she reaches down to stroke her clit, biting at his lip as her orgasm begins to build. Danny’s hips gyrate and swirl against her, faster and faster until he releases.

He buries his face in her hair, panting, depositing tiny pecks across her cheekbones. “Shit. That was…”

“A mistake?”

He shakes his head. “A miracle.”


	9. Post-Carnal Knowledge

They sprawl over their mattress in a twist of limbs, still glossy with perspiration, briefly considering their lives’ choices. Mindy isn’t sure if she’s supposed to be proud or embarrassed or ashamed or triumphant, so she opts for busy.

She locates her lacy underwear half way across the tiny room, trying, and most likely failing, to be demure and adorable as she prances over to retrieve it. This new dynamic with Danny, this caring what he sees and hears; she isn’t sure if she approves.  And seeing as she's spent most of the time she's known him actively seeking his disapproval, she isn't sure how to act anymore.  It's the emotional equivalent of having her hair on backward. 

Mindy puts herself back together, unable to decipher anything about his mood or demeanor in the moonlight.   How is she supposed to just slip back into bed nonchalantly, knowing that she just gave Danny Castellano a hummer AS EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL.    Which leads her to wonder what she thought she was going to get out of the sex.  Extra sandwiches?  She crawls back into their bed,  and Danny silently adjusts for her presence, collecting her into his bound arms, his legs looping around hers protectively.  _Okay, he was in favor of the bad touching.  Now what?_

Instead of facing the wall, she twists so that her head rests near his clavicle, his face bent into her hair (which she immediately worries smells like mildew and peanuts, followed swiftly by worrying about why she's worried because this is Danny, not someone she's trying to impress).

And here, she'd always pictured Danny as the masochist. 

“Why does this feel like the fifty first shade of grey?”  She asks his throat, hoping that he's already fallen asleep, or is at least having a similar crisis of conscience.  
  

“What does that mean?  Is that the Grateful Dead song?”

She sighs, long and languid and purposeful. “I’m just going to blow right past that, you sheltered old fogie.”

“Listen, sweetheart, you can blow past me anytime.”

She pulls back, giving him a dirty look, and is not surprised to find him looking extremely proud of himself, even in the dim lighting. “Gross.”

"Hey, you offered. No take backs."  He yawns, flexing his ankle against her calf.  "Did I ever tell you about when my Nonna got run over in her own driveway?"

Mindy had had boyfriends who liked to tell her trivial facts after sex before (Jeremy used to recite the names of English villages like a prayer:  _Staithes, Burnham Market, Lacock_ , which never didn’t make her giggle), as if with their semen also arrived the fruits of their wisdom but leave it to Danny to invent this entirely new version of post-carnal knowledge. And it involved his grandmother, which was bizarre on an entirely different level.

“Where is this going?” _And do I need to take a bleach shower afterward?_

He drums his finger tips against her kidneys as if to halt her questioning, “So my Nonna, her friend drops her off, and she just creams her, with her Caddie.  But she's old, and she thinks she just took the curb too fast, so she leaves.  And my grandmother, she had to lie at the end of her driveway for hours, until one of the neighbors found her and called the ambulance. Broke her hip, by the way, but you know what she said made her the angriest?”

“I can only imagine what a legitimately crotchety Castellano would be troubled by.”

“She said if she would have had a pack of her smokes, it would have really helped pass the time.” Danny squeezes her waist, “And coincidentally, I could really use a cigarette right now.   Or like, eight.”

 “You are so weird.” She pokes him in the chest. “Was she okay?”

“That tough old broad lived to be 98, and she was a corker til the end. Of course, my little brother Richie was away at school when she passed, and we sort of forgot to tell him, so he thinks she lived to the ripe old age of 107.” Danny’s accent thickens with fatigue, and he’s starting to sound like an early episode of _T_ _he Sopranos_. “Don’t tell him the truth. It’ll kill him.”

Mindy’s own eyelids grow heavy, and she pulls Danny’s button down up around her shoulders, covering them both as a makeshift blanket. Sleep gradually pulls her under, aided by the rhythmic cadence of Danny’s steadily beating heart.

 

 

* * *

 

She wakes before the sun, and briefly buries her face in the sandpapery skin of Danny’s neck, forgetting for a few minutes the time and place, until her heart seizes in fear.

A rumbling comes from the direction of the stairs, signaling their jailer’s arrival in the basement, and Mindy turns toward the wall, inching as far as she can from the still slumbering Danny. She holds her breath as she waits for the door to open, expecting a explosion, but instead hearing only the creak of the old hinges as it swings open. She concentrates on a darkened spot on the concrete wall, holding her body as stiffly as possible. The grocery bag crinkles as it hits the ground, and the door clicks closed. She releases her breath slowly, leaning her head against Danny’s shoulder in relief.

“Min, I’m not going to let him hurt you.” He says, yawning blearily.

“I know you won’t. But what about you?” She twists back to face him, and he opens one eye.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

She doesn’t believe him, and she isn’t sure that he believes himself, but she snuggles into him anyway, and lets him trace tiny shapes onto her hipbone as she falls back to sleep.

* * *

 

It rains on the fourth day; a steady, driving downpour that prevents any bit of daylight from intruding on their tiny  (and progressively permanent) home.  The rain only succeeds in reminding Mindy how desperate she is for a shower, and the lack of sun keeps them both lethargic and lackadaisical, neither even bothering to attempt to read the latest newspaper.  Mindy hangs off the end of the cot, observing their space upside down, just for the change of scenery, and the added bonus of a head rush that feels dangerously close to a nice mojito buzz, as she attempts to list all the romantic comedies that take place in New York.  "Kate and Leopold!"

This jostles Danny out of his third consecutive cat nap of the day, “That's the first thing you've said all day."

Mindy allows him to help pull her up to face him.  “I don’t have a lot to say. Plus, I thought you liked the quiet.”

“I do. But I like you filling the quiet with all your random noise sometimes too.”

“I can do that. Would you rather lick butter from between a goril—“

“I didn’t mean right this second, Mindy. And I also didn’t mean with Would You Rather. I meant, you didn’t really have much to say about us, you know, doing it.” He gestures at their mid-sections.

“Are you sixteen? Doing it? Really?”

“Fine then. About us having sex. Getting down. Making sweet sweet—“

“Oh yuck, Danny. No need to get graphic.”

“So it was just a one time thing?”

“It may have to be, since you carry one condom around like some kind of high school virgin.”

“First of all, how is it even possible to fit a box of condoms into my wallet? You think I’m some kind of sex maniac with a purse?”

"I think that you forgot the Boy Scout motto."

His eyes flash with the familiar irritation, and its appearance is oddly comforting, "Mindy, I was kidnapped.  It's not like I stock up on prophylactics every time I go out to reception.  Plus,"  He looks down at his hands, "It never occurred to me that this would ever..."

Mindy hits his shoulder, wheels turning swiftly, “We should go on a date, me and you.”    All of a sudden, it's Sadie Hawkins Day  in Doctor Jail.

“I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Anything is possible, Danny. We just have to use our imaginations.”

“Why do we need to go on a date?”

“We had sexual relations, Danny. It’s all out of order. And I’m not that kind of girl. I won’t be your basement hostage booty call.”

“You won’t?” Danny’s eyebrows arch, and she sits on her hand to keep from smacking him. He can be infuriating when he wants to be, and clearly, he’s in the mood.

“I’m not. And neither will you. That’s not how you’re made. You’re more traditional than that.”

“Tradition is what this country is built on! We need more—“

Mindy holds up a hand, “I don’t need the lecture, Danny.   I need an invitation for a date.”

He stops mid-rant, “An invit---“ That slow, creeping smile spreads across his face, and Mindy feels the same fizzy, melty feeling that she has not stopped being shocked happens regularly now around Danny, “Mindy, would you like to go on a date with me?”  
 

“Let me check my schedule.”

Danny frowns, “Oh come on, Lahiri!”

She smiles back, “Okay, I’m free. I mean, I’m totally hostage right now, but my schedule is wide open.”

"Okay then, it's a date."  He offers his hand, to shake.  "I'll pick you up at eight."

 

 


	10. The One Armed Paper Hanger

Mindy doesn’t have any make up, or shampoo, or even a set of clean underwear at her disposal to prepare for her date, although currently, the trappings of a traditional first date seem to matter a little bit less, considering their circumstances. Nothing like a horrible pit of despair to make a girl realize that she’s been emphasizing the wrong syllables, dating wise, for the past fifteen years.

Danny has no intention of allowing her to see what he’s planning, either, and he essentially forces her to face the opposite direction for hours while he readies whatever it is that he has on his agenda.   She hears a lot of rustling and tearing and ripping going on in his portion of the room, and she isn’t sure what to make of it. He unleashes a string of expletives more than once, including one _d_ _agblasted_ , causing Mindy to wonder if she needs to check his birth date on his driver’s license one more time just to ensure that he is, in fact, in his thirties.

“Finally!” Danny exclaims, and then emits a high pitched yelp. “Shit. Fuck. Shit. Balls.”

“Do you need help?” He sounds like an animal caught in a trap. She starts to turn, but Danny appears in front of her with his right arm free from the duct tape, and hanging rather oddly from his shoulder socket. “What did you do?”

“I got free. But I, uh,” His face is devoid of color, and it’s clear that whatever contortion he engaged in to remove himself from his cuffs has caused him far more pain than he was prepared to deal with, “I need you to reset it. This has happened before.  You just have to pop it back into place for me.”  Of course Danny could be cool and off-handed about having an appendage dangling precariously in front of him, and of course she was going to be the one to have to fix it.

“Oh, no.” Mindy shakes her head. “I’m not…”

“Mindy, you’re a doctor. You can do it.”  His jaw tenses, and perspiration is already starting to form on his upper lip from the pain. 

“I’m a vagina doctor. If your vagina pops out of place, I’m your girl. Not this.”

“No, you’re my girl for this, too. Please. I don’t want to pass out during our date.” From the grit of his teeth, he’s not exaggerating. “I’ll walk you through it. Please.”

“No, I know what to do. Just lay down. Take a deep breath.” She nudges him toward the bed, and he obliges, his arm hanging off the edge. Mindy laces her fingers through Danny’s, and he noticeably winces as she squeezes, pulling his arm slightly away from his torso. With a firm, steady motion, she provides constant tension until she hears the joint pop back into place. Danny grunts, and she rubs the top of his arm. “All better.”

He sits up, slowly, holding his arm with his opposite hand. “You did great. Thank you.” The color gradually returns to his face, and he stands with her, toe to toe. “This isn’t usually how I pick up my dates.” His face is close, a little too close to make any sense, and a little to close not to wonder why he isn’t kissing her yet. His hands meander down toward her tush. “Like a moth to a flame.”  He mumbles, leaning in, his eyes full of dark focus.

“You’ve got magnets in those hands, Danny.” She jokes, pulling away to break the tension. “But you need to buy me dinner first.”

He kisses the top of her nose, an oddly familiar gesture for two people whose relationship could best be described as tumultuous, “I’ll pick you up in an hour. I still have some work to do.”

She catches his left hand, the extra duct tape still hanging from his wrist, “Can’t wait.”

Danny smiles, and her heart kicks with electricity, her ribs a cage no longer meant to contain it: no, she really can’t wait.

* * *

 

 

Danny arrives at what she assumes is promptly 8 pm (or knowing him, ten minutes before), via a knock on the inside of the basement door, “You decent?”

“Come in, it’s open!”  She calls, play acting her casual, aloof first date vibe. 

As she turns to face him, she realizes why he needed both hands fully functional.  All of her origami creations: the flowers, and the cranes, the stars are positioned around the room, stuck in various cracks and crevices and adhered with what she’s sure is peanut butter from their sandwiches. But there are more origami pieces than she remembers making, and she knows that the cursing wasn’t all about Danny’s shoulder injury. “Did you make these?”

He nods, “I know they aren’t as good as yours. I told you, I never had the patience.” He gives her an approving once-over, his voice dipping low, “You look nice.”

She nervously smooths her skirt down with her palms, “Oh, this old thing?” She's modified her outfit by leaving a few buttons of her blouse undone, and rolling up the waist of her skirt to shorten it, her old private school trick.  She also pulled her increasingly lank hair up into a loose bun, using a rubber band from one of their newspapers.  Danny is his own version of dressed up too, with his dress shirt tucked in and his black hair combed back neatly.

He offers her his arm, “Our reservations await.”  She accepts, and they take a few unnecessary laps around their cell, pretending to walk to the restaurant, and taking in the sites along the way.  Danny faux-shivers, "It's chilly out tonight." 

Mindy points at one of the stars that she'd made from a Saks sale ad, "But the sky is so clear." 

They sit cross-legged on the floor, where Danny has spread out sections of the newspaper as the table and seating; peanut butter sandwiches and apples positioned at each of their place settings. He’s even made a paper envelope that holds a few more of her origami flowers to serve as their centerpiece. “Just imagine there’s candlelight, okay?” 

“Danny.” His name comes out as a whisper, “This is so…” She doesn’t even have the strength to list the adjectives, but she knows that there’s a list: unexpected, out of character, incredible, amazing, perfect.

He lowers his eyes sheepishly, his lashes throwing shadows onto his cheekbones. “I’m glad you like it, Mindy.” Danny leans over their table, threading his fingers into her hair, and guiding her face to his.  "I used my imagination, like you said." 

“I’m really glad you have two hands again.”

“Me too.”

Their sandwiches and fruit forgotten, Mindy and Danny stumble back to the bed, stripping off a breadcrumb trail of clothing as they go. Danny yanks his t-shirt over his head, revealing the eggplant and ecru of his bruising interspersed with his dark chest chair. She spirits her finger tips over his skin, “You didn’t tell me, Danny.”

“I’m okay.” He pants, “Let's just---.” His hands are everywhere; tangled in her hair, caressing her arms, snatching at her hips, and Mindy’s head spins with need. “Please.” He lowers her gradually onto the mattress, genuflecting in front of her. Mindy’s hands tangle in his hair as he gently parts her knees, wrapping her legs around his shoulders, his breath hot on her thighs.

A sound she’s not emitted before escapes her throat as Danny’s chin prickles against her skin, and she tenses involuntarily as he brushes her inner thighs with his lips, and finally with his tongue.  He pauses, his hair pointed like stars from her tugging at it, her moisture still on his lips.  "Look, Min, no hands."  He smirks.

This time, when she sees stars, Danny is her universe.

* * *

 

"Ugh, first dates are the worst."  Mindy announces, her legs still a little shaky from Danny's earlier performance.  She's curled into his side, his right hand tight on her rear end.

"I do not know what date you were on, but that was not a bad first anything." 

Mindy glances up at him, "No, it wasn’t."  Her stomach growls, and she tiptoes over to their dinner table, grabbing one of the sandwiches and an apple to eat in bed.  "What was your real first date like?   Tell me everything.  Did you take her to a joust?"

"What are you talking about, what joust?"

"You’re six hundred years old, I just assume that you did something medieval."  She chomps into the apple and hands it to Danny for a bite. 

Chewing for a second, "You're terrible."

"I am not. I am perfect and beautiful and impossible to resist."

"Accurate."  He contemplates the fruit for a second, before crunching into it loudly, and giving her a ridiculously charming grin.  "That was fun."

"We barely even made it into the restaurant!"

"It's not a real restaurant, Mindy, and what we did was way more fun."

"Accurate."  Mindy finishes her snack, and settles back down, making patterns in his chest hair, careful to avoid his injuries.  “We’re not getting out of here, are we?”

“It is starting to seem pretty hopeless.” 

“Holy crap, Danny, we’re living in a Rihanna song.” 

“I have no idea which song, but kill me now.”  He groans.

"Maybe this is what Stockholm Syndrome is?"

"No, that’s when you empathize and identify with your captors. Not when you sleep with your fellow captive."

"That does it.  When we get out of here, we're inventing a new syndrome.  Of course, we'll have a journal article to write.   We should definitely make some kind of pun on the word _bond_."

" _Bound By Love_."

"Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves."  She holds up a hand in protest, but she can't pretend that her heart didn't skip a beat.

" _Bound by Like_?  It's not as catchy."

" _Bound by Respect and Mutual Admiration_?"

"That’s a little long for the header, I think."

" _Captive-ated Colleagues_!"

" _Hearts Held Hostage_."

" _Hopelessly Hogtied to You_."

" _I Wanna Hold Your Hand(cuff)!"_

"Listen, we'll work on it.  We have time.  Let's put a pin in it for now."  Danny squeezes her hip, but the pain in his face is evident.  "Your arm?"

He nods.  "It's just..."  She scoots back, extricating herself from his side.  "Sore."

"We should probably call it a night, anyway.  First dates usually don't last this long."  She begins to collect her clothing, pulling on her blouse, and her skirt.   She isn't sure if she wants to admit to herself that she's not ready for it to be over.  Not yet. 

"When we do ever do anything by the book?"  Danny uses his good hand to pull her back to him, and he squeezes his face into her neck, his breath appley and warm. "I think you were right before."

She shivers, "About what? I’m right about a lot of things."

"About it being easier to dislike the things I couldn’t have."  Danny releases her briefly, reaching down to extract something from his shirt pocket.  "I forgot to give you this."  He holds up one of her origami creations, partially obscured in the shadows of the moonlight.  He deposits the carefully folded paper heart on her chest, a vulnerably wide-eyed look of expectation on his face.  "I made it for you this afternoon.  I couldn't figure out how to make the beating part, though.  Sorry."

"Danny."  Her voice catches in her throat, and she knows for certain that she and Danny aren't leaving here the same way they came in.  Not even close.

 

 


	11. Two By Two

It rains for days, one of those build an ark and gather the species two by two deluges, with hours upon hours of house shaking thunder and teeth rattling lightning, and no end in sight. From the sheer amount of precipitation, water flows freely through the cracks in the basement foundation, creating twisted rivers that snake around their tiny room, soaking their newspapers and their feet,  when they opt to put them on the floor.  The apocalyptic weather only serves to  convince Danny that they’re about to endure the seven plagues, and more than once he’s mentioned that he’s heard frogs croaking outside their window. “Just wait for the pestilence, Mindy, you won’t be laughing then.” She still giggles thinking about how his little eyebrows were all knit together, so serious about locusts and boils and diseased livestock.

“God, Danny, we’re Jack and Rose, if they both fit on that stupid door.” Mindy muses, from her perch in the crook of Danny’s arm, watching as another stream of water begins anew, and creeps toward their still dry shoes. Mindy’s spent the majority of the last few days in just that spot, as if she is Danny’s lazy house cat; it’s just where she seems to fit.

“You know damn well that they both fit on that door, but she was too dumb and selfish to move over.” He karate chops into the Travel section, his mouth pinched with misplaced anger. Danny now sports a full-fledged beard, and she realizes belatedly how much she misses the tiny divot in his chin. If only she would have caressed it more when she had the chance, she laments, which she also recognizes as a bizarre thought to have, on at least six levels.

“How dare you. Kate Winslet is a national treasure.”

“Well, she let her boyfriend drown, so...” Mindy briefly wonders if she shouldn’t take a page out of Kate’s book, and give Danny a metaphorical shove into an icy ocean, but then he shoots her that ridiculously easy crooked half smile, and she forgets her own name, let alone the movie or the shoving.

“When we get out of here, can we take a trip? Somewhere with wide open spaces?  I know, no oceans, maybe somewhere really crowded—“

“You just want to stand in the middle of Times Square?” Danny stretches, and even with the lumberjack beard, he’s unable to hide his grimace of pain.

“Did you need me to move?” Mindy asks, concerned. They had fashioned a make shift sling out of his button down after their date, but Danny hated wearing it.  He had spent at least twenty minutes complaining that it wasn't like he had to cut it off like that guy from _127 Hours,_ because apparently in Danny's mind, the only excuse for immobilizing an injury was if you had a recent rock-climbing mishap.   Instead, his shirt sits neatly folded at the end of their bed, waiting to be used as Mindy's blanket in the evening, Danny's paper heart tucked into the pocket. 

“You like it there. It helps you sleep.” Which was another thing she wasn’t really doing lately, even though she knew it was the quickest way to pass the time. (Okay, second quickest.)

“It’s killing you. You should see yourself right now. You look like you just did the Ice Bucket Challenge. Danny, I can’t sleep if I know that I’m causing you all that pain.” She rubs his belly over his t-shirt, long strokes back and forth over his firm abdomen. She half expects him to purr. She never knew what a tactile guy Danny was before now, although she wasn’t sure how that would have come up at a staff meeting, or in the operating room.

“Hey, the pain is there whether you are or not. Stay. I’d rather have it with you than without, y’know?” He shrugs and her heartbeat surges. _Ugh, stop being adorable. It’s going to make it so much harder when I find your lifeless body in the morning._

“My lifeless body?”  Danny raises an eyebrow.

The warmth spreads quickly to her face, “I said that out loud? Shit.”  The exhaustion is taking its toll, apparently, and god knows what other thoughts she's narrated without her knowledge.

“Is it lifeless because you kill me or from the internal bleeding?”

“Both.”

“Good to know.” He growls into her neck, fingers stumbling to unbutton her blouse.   With Danny’s lips against her throat, and then her clavicle, and her breasts, his erection pressing hard against her hip, she quickly loses the thread of the conversation.

 

* * *

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, the room black and still humid, Danny whisper-recites into her breastbone, “I like my body when it is with your body.”

She drops a kiss onto the crown of his head, “That’s beautiful. Is that Drake?”

“Who's Drake?"

* * *

 

 

 

He isn’t eating, not like she is, and his cheekbones are becoming model-prominent. She has never wanted to physically feed someone a sandwich by force, not anyone not featured in a glossy magazine spread anyway, and yet here he is, letting her eat all their rations and becoming all Italian mothers worst nightmare: Skinny. “You have to eat.”

“You need it more than I do.”

“I don’t. I lied about my super fast metabolism. It’s like, medium, at best. Eat.” She pushes half of her sandwich at him, and he frowns and pushes it back.

“I’m good.”

Mindy sits up, her back resting against the wall. She gestures at her lap, and Danny squeezes in, arms across her thighs. She runs her fingers absently through his hair, trying to ignore the clench in her gut. “You’re a liar.”

 

* * *

 

 “Why have I never noticed how tiny your ears are before now?”  Mindy reaches out, tracing the ridge down toward his earlobe.

“Maybe because you hadn’t tried to put one in your mouth yet.”

“I told you, it looked like a potato chip! And to be honest, it also tasted like one.”

He rubs at it absently, remembering the incident of the previous day,  “I identify very strongly with Evander Holyfield now.”

“I told you I was sorry. Repeatedly. Get over it, 'cause it's probably going to happen again."

"Is that a threat?"  Danny reaches for her rib cage, biting at her neck playfully, "Because two can play at that game."

 

* * *

 

 

“Ten days, Danny, TEN DAYS. Count on your fingers if you need to, but it has been TEN DAYS.   They are never coming for us.” Mindy paces the length of the room for the ninetieth time in the past thirty minutes.

“I know, Min, I know.” Danny had been diligently working on making playing cards out of the paper for the majority of the morning, and newspaper ink is streaked near his eyes and into his beard.

“You look like Tom Hanks in _Castaway_. This is getting serious.”

“I’m having sex with the volleyball, so I’d say so.”

“Ex-squeeze me?”

He smiles, devilishly. “I mean, you’re way better than the volleyball, don’t get me wrong.”

“How very dare you.” She glares at him, but her resolve is no match for her mental exhaustion. She collapses into a heap on the dirty floor, her head on Danny’s knee. “I’m starving. For real, hot food that you eat with a knife and a fork.”

“We can fork later, if you want."  He offers.

She ignores him, because she doesn't want to encourage anymore of the word play, frankly.  “I’m pathologically bored, like stuck in a blackout, no electricity, Amish variety bored.  So bored that I might pluck my eyes out just for the entertainment value.”

“Please don’t do that. I get squeamish whenever I see _Terminator_.”  He shudders at the mental image.

“I miss my parents, and Rishi, and Gwen and Alex, and even Morgan.”

“Speaking of Morgan, you don’t think he took us do you? He did call himself Ransom, and he’s an ex-con.”

“No, he’s too well-meaning and I haven't heard a dog bark the whole time we've been here.”

“His tattoo says _No More Stealing Cars_."

“It doesn’t say _No More Stealing People_ , though. I don’t think he would do this to us, anyway.” Mindy reaches up and pinches Danny’s cheeks, hard. “I want a bear claw. I want a real, fluffy blanket. I want an aspirin because I have a headache.”

“Understood.”

“Danny, my leg hair has leg hair! And I do not even want to talk about my bikini area.”

“I do,” He waggles his new found bushy eyebrows, reminding Mindy to ask him if he tweezes or waxes, later.

“We smell like farm animals—“

“I’ve been looking for the goat!”

She rolls her eyes, “I am sick to death of your bad dad jokes, too, sorry.   I miss Twitter and Tumblr and my DVR.  I want a clean pair of underwear…I miss my apartment and work and taxis and subways, and I just want to get out of here.  Only I don’t think we’re ever getting out of here.  I think there’s a really good chance that we’re going to be left here to die, and the only thing I don’t miss is sex, because man, do we have a set up for that, aside from the part where we smell like the flamingo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. So we’ll be down here, wasting away, but doing it like flamingos, and I’m going to end up giving birth to our mixed race baby by the water heater—“

“We have a water heater?”

“What is that thing?” She points to the boiler, “And excuse you, this is my nervous breakdown, not an episode of _This Old House_ —“

“Sorry, continue.”

“We are going to have to raise our water heater baby down here, on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and she’ll never know what we look like without a thick coat of grime and matted hair, and it’ll be the Stone Age all over again, but with jelly instead of saber tooth tigers.”

“Min, can I say something?” He catches her hand as she gesticulates, stroking her fingers with his thumb.

“Sure.”

“If I thought that was going to happen to us, and I don’t, because I have a little thing called faith,” he kisses his crucifix for emphasis, "and that faith tells me that we’re going to be rescued. And it’s okay if you don’t have that same faith, because I have enough for the both of us. But I promise you, I will definitely take turns staying up with the mixed race water heater baby.”

"THAT is what you got out of all of that?”

“Well, that, and you’re over-tired and you’re scared, and I get it. I’m scared too. But at least there is always going to be one other person in this universe who gets it, who understands exactly what it was like being down here, and that isn’t ever going to change.”

Something about the way he looks at her makes her believe him, even if she probably shouldn't.  She can already feel her pulse slowing, her heart beat regulating,  “I know.”

He helps her off the floor, and back over to their cot. “You said you have a headache?” He adjusts to lean back against the wall and pull Mindy between his legs, her head resting on his chest. He rubs her temples for a few minutes until she’s lolled into complacency, her breathing coming less rapidly, then reaches down for one of the sections of newspaper he’s yet to have destroyed,  "Why don't I read you the stock quotes until you fall asleep?  You like that.”

“With the voices?”

“You got it. Nasdaq or Standard and Poor's?”

“Surprise me.”

He begins to read, in the world’s worst French accent, “Oh, zee Nasdaq ez up today! Zirty-one points! Looks like zee Apple is up and Wal—“

Mindy places her hand over his, “Don’t read the retail ones. I don’t want to be reminded.”

In his regular accent, “You got it, Toots.” He continues, “Exxon took a dive—“

Mindy’s eyelids droop somewhere around Hewlett Packard, and she’s sound asleep before the final bell sounds.

 

 

Mindy is caught between REM cycles, her head heavy with exhaustion, limbs thrown carelessly over her sleeping partner when she hears a flurry of footsteps on the stairs, and the door to their cell flies open.

“Get the fuck up!” The voice isn’t at all familiar, but it's angry,  and Mindy’s heart pounds in her ears.  Now she knows that Danny was telling the truth all those days ago. “Get the fuck up, you sonofabitch.”

“Please don’t hurt her. I’ll come with you, just don’t hurt her.” Danny gives the top of her arm a squeeze, and releases, turning back toward their attacker.  In the dark, she can make out the kidnapper, dressed in all black, his face obscured with a ski mask.  He's easily twice Danny's size, all shoulders and long arms, and he plucks Danny off of their bed by the neck of his tee shirt, throwing him toward the exit.

Danny struggles to find his footing, still bleary from his deep sleep, and Mindy screams as the figure in black tackles Danny, wrenching his right arm beneath him, and a gruesomely loud _crack_ reverberates against the sodden walls. 

Mindy runs toward the struggling men, throwing herself onto the scrum, but the larger man grabs her by the hair and pulls, effectively throwing her back toward the roll away bed.  Her forehead makes contact with the metal frame and somehow, it just seems easier to let her eyes fall closed than stay awake. 

When she comes to, Danny is nowhere to be found.

 

 


	12. They're Real and They're Spectacular

Mindy can’t tell how long it takes to collect herself: counting fingers and toes, arms and legs, making sure that she isn’t bleeding or broken in some way. She takes stock of her injuries carefully: aching head, check; sore neck, check; stiffness in shoulder, check; disappearing Danny, check.

That’s the one that jump starts the panic, and it permeates her nervous system efficiently, accelerating her breathing, inciting her heart. She’s dizzy with the possibilities, all of them causing her to stagger toward the wall, bracing herself against it to catch her breath. _What if he never comes back?_

It doesn’t take long for her brain to begin the less than arduous task of convincing herself that he had never been there at all; maybe she’d only conjured up this fantastical vision of her co-worker to while away hours and hours of inhuman treatment, to escape and feel something other than trapped, and afraid, and alone.

And she almost achieves it, the mental reassurance that this isn’t happening, except she catches sight of his shirt sitting folded at the end of her bed. The blue checked oxford shirt, probably purchased with care by his mother, covered in the detritus of their stay: the droplets of blood from his cuts, the smears of gray ink from his various time passing newspaper projects, and the purple smudges of jelly because she would chase him with her sticky hands after she ate. She sinks her nose into the fabric, now stiff with sweat and dirt and grime, and it smells like her, instead of him.

But, she chides herself, that shirt could have belonged to anyone, from anywhere. It doesn’t have to belong to Danny, and maybe there’s a better than average chance that it doesn’t. The paper heart from her potentially imaginary date is still housed in the pocket, though, a memorial to her possible delusion.

Tears burn at the back of her throat until she remembers that Danny had a wallet, or at least Dream Danny did, and she yelps with relief when she catches sight of the leather billfold huddled under the bed with his watch. Mindy kneels on the damp floor and neatly unpacks the contents, lining them along an oblique crack in the concrete.

She studies his driver’s license photo, and it’s barely the Danny that she knows now, not with his clean shaven face and the grim set of his mouth. She traces the precise script of his signature, examines the empiricism of his height and weight, eyes: brown; hair: black. All of it: Danny. _He exists._

She organizes the membership cards by color, and then alphabetically, because that seems like how he’d want them kept. He’s always been so rigid about external order, and now she knows that it has everything to do with how he copes with his internal chaos. She hesitates over what she knows is his wedding photo, the tiny rectangle of yellowing paper, and she almost doesn’t want to open it. She isn’t sure what she thinks she’ll find there, if he’ll seem happier than she’s ever seen him, or if it would hurt more that he seemed like he was never happy at all.

She’s never pretended to have a surplus of willpower, and she unfolds the picture as slowly and deliberately as she can, as if Danny might come slamming through the door to stop her, and in many ways, she wishes he would. But she flattens the last corner, to absolutely zero fanfare, and realizes that everything hurts exactly the same.

She throws herself on their bed dramatically, a downward facing snow angel, too exhausted to properly cry. Her face burns with the tears she’s already shed, and she can’t get warm, no matter how many layers of newspapers she converts into primitive blankets. The damp is seared into her bones, making her entire body numb with cold, and she doesn’t even want to acknowledge her most tertiary fear, let alone the enormous gaping chasm it lives in.

Mindy knows that her imagination is getting the better of her when she hears the door creaking open, and even more so when she hears the soft _thump_ of limbs deposited against a concrete floor.

She smells the whiskey before she recognizes the familiar breathing rattle. “Danny!”

The last time she’d moved this fast, someone was grabbing for the last Stella McCartney at a tag sale, and she skins her knees against the cement as she skids to his side. “Danny.”

His clothes are soaked in sweat, and he reeks of a distillery, but he’s back, in living color, and despite her worry, her head buzzes with excitement for his return. “Danny? Can you hear me?”

He makes an unintelligible noise in response, curling into the fetal position. She skirts her fingers over his cheekbones and forehead, inspecting him, but mostly just wanting to feel him, to make sure that he’s real. “Tell me what hurts.”

“All of it,” he pants, and he opens one eye to look at her. “Your two heads are nice. Pretty.”

She doesn’t know what to feel first: relief, worry, concern, joy. Instead, she presses her lips to his, “I thought I imagined you.” His mouth is still tinged metallic and bitter,  the after effects of whatever he endured out of her grasp, but he's there, mostly in one piece. _He’s real. He’s really real._     She sniffs at him again. “You smell like a flamingo at a frat party. What the hell, Castellano?”

He grunts, “For pain. He gave me something for the pain.” He closes his eyes again, grimacing as he accidentally shifts his arm. “A lot of pain.”

“And a lot of something,” Mindy mutters as she ties his arm into the sling he’s always refused, mostly because he’s too disoriented to argue. Mindy commences checking him for further injury, despite his muffled protests. Nothing seems life threatening, and she helps him lie down on the cot, settling with his head on her lap.

Danny sleeps fitfully as she combs her fingers through his hair, unable to will herself to do the same, for fear she'll wake up and find him gone again.

He rests for a few hours, improbably, until his injury pushes him back into consciousness and Mindy’s waiting curiosity. “Come on, you have to tell me everything you saw up there. Where are we? Are there more bodies? Guns? Ammo? A red room?”

He shakes his head, “No, nothing crazy. Just a giant flat screen television. And lots of booze. But I’m pretty sure we’re in Connecticut.”

Mindy rolls the word around on her tongue, “Connecticut? Oh my God. This is exactly how they treat the all the illegal housekeepers out here. No one is ever going to find us. Why couldn’t I take up day drinking like you did?”

“I didn’t—Mindy, my arm is dangling out of its socket. I deserve some whiskey.” He says, through gritted teeth. “I don’t think he meant to---I don’t think he wants to hurt you, at all.”

“What about you?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Danny struggles to sit up, and Mindy acts as a lever to prop him against the wall. He clenches his jaw, taking in his air sharply. “Sonuva—“

Mindy strokes at his temple with her thumb, “Will you just let me take care of you please?”

“Unless you have surgical equipment and some plaster hiding under your skirt, you’re not going to be able to take care of me.” He labors to get out from under her touch, and as he does so, his filthy t-shirt hitches up, revealing a glaring black bruise, blue and purple and yellow around the edges, stretching from the area over his kidneys onto his side.

She skates her fingertips over the tender skin, “Danny.”

“I’m fine, Min.”

“You could go into shock from the internal bleeding.”

“I'm not bleeding internally and I’m not going to go into shock.”  She isn't sure why he's looking at her like she's the crazy one.

She crosses her arms, glaring at him. His personality is very Day One in Captivity, all of a sudden, and she can feel the tears sliding down her face. “I thought you were dead, Danny, all day, and I was so sad, and now that you’re back, and being such a jerk, I kind of wish you were.”

He smiles ruefully, “I get that a lot.” He reaches out to squeeze her forearm. “I’m sorry, Min. I’m back now, and you can do whatever you want to me.” He wiggles his eyebrows, mock-suggestively. “I have some ideas, if you’re interested.”

“Stop it, this is not a one hummer fits all situation, Castellano.” 

“Maybe just graze it?”

“It could kill you!”

“It won’t kill me. And even if it does, at least I’ll die doing something I loved.” He gives her a pouty lip, and she mentally swears that she won’t give in, no matter how pathetic he looks.

“Shush, you, it's the brain damage talking.” She pats his thigh, a little patronizingly.

Danny stares up at her, with a strange intensity, scanning the tracks her tears have made on her dust smeared face, and he reaches up to stroke one away, his voice low, “I don’t want to make you cry.”

She shakes her head, “It wasn’t you. It was…”

“He made you cry? Let me at ‘em…” Danny tries, and fails, to propel himself off the mattress, and instead ends up in a heap at her side.

“Easy, Killer.” She’s weirdly comforted by his need to defend her honor, but Danny’s exhausted, and hurt, and even though she wants to probe him with questions and force him to keep her company, she lets him fall asleep against her, snoring softly, until she finally follows.

* * *

 

 

“Danny, can I ask you something?” He’d been back at least a day, maybe more, and although he wasn't better, he didn't seem to be worse, either.  With the rations slowing to one sandwich per day, Mindy is positive that her stomach is poised to devour itself within the hour from the lack of nutrition.

“Where am I going?” His nose twitches as he attempts to reposition himself more comfortably. Mindy marvels at his completely unnecessary need to mask his pain.

“How come you paid attention to me, before?” It been bothering her since he’d mentioned it, that he thought he knew her because he paid attention to her, and she couldn’t help but wonder why she hadn’t noticed him noticing her.

“Because, you…you were always all up in my grill.”

“That’s not how you talk.” She pokes him in the right shoulder, “You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Then you’re not telling the whole story.”

Danny sighs, clearly wishing their prison had more exits, “I think you know by now, I liked you.”

“You don’t like me anymore?” Mindy’s voice gets higher, in her outrage, and she knows she's being shrill for no good reason, but she continues nonetheless.

“I like you now.” 

“You didn’t like me before?”

“Good God, Mindy, I’m injured here, cut me some slack. Stop parsing my verbs. I paid attention to you because I wanted to. I don’t do things I don’t want to do. I told you that.”

“You told me a lot of things.”  She takes a defensive posture, and she can almost see the wheels turning behind his eyes, looking for his escape hatch.

He pets at her hair, a bit drunkenly for a sober person, “Shh, I’m brain damaged.”

* * *

 

 

After their breakfast of a quarter of a sandwich each, Mindy and Danny lay on the cold, hard concrete, contemplating the metal duct as it glints in the morning sunlight, Danny’s head on Mindy’s belly. “I wonder if Anna and Colin had their baby.” She flicks at his earlobe, and in her malnourished state, it’s starting to take on that eerily potato chippy vibe again.

Even though he’s right next to her, he’s still a little out of it, and she’s caught him holding his breath more than once when the discomfort gets to be more than he can take. But since he's Danny, he still won’t admit to her when he’s in pain, and she has no way to help him, blow jobs aside, even if he did.

Danny twists his head to catch her eye, and probably preserve his ear. “What did they say they were going to name him? Caleb?”

“That’s a nice name.” Mindy says, distracted. “We used to have a life outside of here, Danny. Do you think it’s going to be there when we get out?  Do you think they invented a new form of social media already? Will we have the same friends?  Or will everyone treat us like Nell, and study us for science? Maybe we should go ahead and get pregnant now, so at least we have one more person that has gone through this with us, and in case something happens to one of us—“

“It's only been two weeks. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary for us to repopulate the basement, Min.” He takes her hand, and brings it up to his lips. “Plus, you know it’s just your hanger talking.”

“I withdraw the question, Counselor.” She sits up, cupping his head in the process. “I wonder what everyone will say about us, when they hear what happened down here.”

Danny wraps his free arm back around her waist, squeezing, “They’ll never believe it.”

“I don’t know if I believe it.” Mindy looks around, taking in their squalid surroundings, “Maybe this basement is magical.”

He shrugs, “I don’t know if it’s magical, but it just proves that you never know what’s going to be romantic ahead of time.  Everybody doesn't have to stand in the rain, wearing wedding dresses and chasing Rachel McAdams through fountains to figure out they like each other.” He threads his fingers through her hair, pulling her face down to his, brushing his lips against her chin when it’s all he can reach. “Plus, I don’t really care what other people say about us. It’s none of their business.”

“It’s just…we’re pretty far opposites in a lot of ways.”

“I know. I’m a devout Catholic, and you’re…what you are.”

“A not that devout Hindu,” Mindy finishes for him, “But I do have a Jared Leto change jar that says _Jesus Saves_ on my dresser.”

Danny sighs, “Oh boy.”

“But none of that matters.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You know why it doesn’t matter?” Mindy doesn’t let him answer, “Because I found my way in here.” She thumps on his sternum for emphasis, and he flinches, just a bit, before he recovers for her benefit.

Once he catches his breath, he says matter-of-factly, his eyes shining, “Yeah, you’re wedged right in there.”

* * *

 

Danny wakes up, in the middle of the night, and the only way she knows it’s the middle of night is that the moonlight is almost non-existent, and she can barely make out his silhouette in its absence. His voice is pleading, and brittle with need, “Please, help me.”

She’s still disoriented, and she reaches for his face, kissing his clammy forehead. “You’re having a bad dream, Danny, go back to sleep.”

“No, Min, it’s not a dream.” He pants, clutching her hip, his breathing too shallow and too rapid, and it thrusts her into reality and action. “Do something, please.”

The panic returns, electrifying her nerve endings, and she wishes she was dreaming, too, because Mindy knows exactly what this is.   It’s shock from blood loss, that stupid bruise that he wouldn’t acknowledge, that stubborn bit of Castellano pride that kept him from admitting it was more than just superficial marks on his flesh caused this, and she can't solve it, not by a long shot.  

She does what she can to make him comfortable, which isn 't much, and begins her assault on the door to their basement cell, pounding and kicking, alternating her palms and fists until her knuckles are bloody and peeling. “HELP! PLEASE HELP!  CALL 911!  HELP US!  HELP!”  She screams until she's hoarse, and she wonders why she didn't do this days ago.

In what the little of the morning light their basement lair collects, Danny's skin is gray, beads of sweat gathering along his hairline, his rapidly beating pulse evident in the tension of his neck.  “Wake up. Please wake up.” She repeats his name like a mantra, scratching against her already raw throat. “C’mon, Danny, I know I threaten to kill you at least once a day, but I swear, I don’t want you to die. And if you do, it’s going to be at my hand, you sonuvabitch.” She slaps at his face, maybe a little too hard, but she figures he deserves a little jolt regardless.

“Okay, fine, Plan B.”

“HELP US! PLEASE HELP! HE’S GOING TO DIE IF YOU DON’T HELP US!”

Danny makes a tiny noise, and a kernel of hope seizes her, “Please be okay. I need you. I can’t do this without you. I think…I think I might be falling for you, which I recognize is ridiculous, because you are the worst, most of the time. But you are also super sweet, and you’re complicated, but you’ve taken such good care of me in this god forsaken place and you’ve been very entertaining for someone who is extremely dull by nature—all right, fine, I think I love you, Danny, so stop being so dramatic.”

“And listen, Castellano, we’ve got stuff to do when we get out of here. First, we’re taking a damn vacation. I don’t care where we go, as long as you’re there. You can even complain about the poor airline service and yell at the concierge if you want. And when we get home, we’re going to hang out, and watch movies, and I’m going to wear your Columbia sweatshirt and spill popcorn all over your couch, and probably accidentally grind it into your carpet. And I’m going to watch you shave off that stupid Grizzly Man beard, and you’re going to order dessert for a change. We’re going to take bubble baths, and long drives to the Hamptons, and go on real dates, to real restaurants, and you’re going to be alive for all of that, whether you like it or not. Because this is happening, like you said. It’s happening, Danny, so you're gonna have to wake up to talk me out of it.” 

Although Mindy momentarily confuses them with sound effects from one of the movies that's always playing overhead, the sound of sirens is hazy, but they seem to be getting closer, and she knows they're real when the red and blue lights fill the glass block window.


	13. Started From The Basement Now We're Here

The police officer that reaches Mindy first has very gentle eyes, soft, etched in crows-feet and warmly hazel, and she hugs onto his neck for a length of time that could be considered unseemly.  It does help to assuage some of her anxiety, seeing as she refuses to watch as the EMTs and emergency responders tend to Danny.

The officer pats her back, and murmurs the police equivalent of “there, there” over and over until Mindy’s hysterical sobbing subsides into something closer to the hiccups. Everything moves very quickly, and very slowly, all at the same time.

She robotically allows the paramedics to check her blood pressure, and examine her pupils, and mostly, she just wants to sit down and take it all in, and strangely, not be bothered. She’d prefer be a spectator to the SWAT team vans, and the ambulances, and the fire trucks, and the flurry of activity that she hasn’t been close to seeing for two weeks, and she half- heartedly searches for Liam Neeson, because she knows, deep down, that he’d come for her. Eventually.

The kind detective holds her hand, and rubs at her back, and he’s clearly the criminal justice version of Danny Castellano, all weirdly sturdy and physically touchy, and she swallows thickly as she senses the tears about to bubble back up. “It’s going to be okay, Miss Lahiri. The cavalry is here. He’s going to go away for a long time.”

It takes a few seconds for it to register that the officer is talking about their kidnapper, and not Danny. Officers, some in dress blues, others in plainclothes hover nearby, probably wanting to take statements, or probe with her questions.  Her protector won’t allow it, and she sits for a long time with the blood pressure cuff forgotten on her arm, the paramedic that it belongs to standing behind the ambulance rig conferring with his partner.

It’s sunny, too sunny, and Mindy shields her eyes with her hand as she counts the police cars from New York, and then the ones from New Canaan, Connecticut.  There are the random black SUVs of the FBI agents, two ambulance, and three fire trucks, and none of them contain Danny, not that she can tell. She almost tells the officer, _He’s never late. Please see what’s taking him so long_ , as if they have tickets to the Met, or a baseball game.

A radio walkie talkie she didn’t realize her officer possessed vibrates with static, and before she can object, he whisks her into his waiting patrol car, gentling pushing her head down so she can enter the backseat. “I’ll take you to the hospital now, miss. We’ll meet your friend there.”

She cranes her neck to see if she can catch a glimpse of Danny, or their captor, or anything but a plain two story house in a seemingly quiet residential neighborhood in Connecticut. “You’re finally going home, Miss Lahiri.”

And for the first time in two weeks, that isn't where her interest lies.

* * *

 

Mindy is shuttled from emergency room to private room to radiology to exam room and back to private room, and after much cajoling, she’s finally told that Danny is in surgery, details continually murky.  As long as she’s been out of the basement, she still hasn’t laid eyes on a familiar face.

She’s helped into the shower by nursing assistants who hand her brand new bottles of shampoo, and honeysuckle soap, and hold her steady as she scrubs twenty pounds of dirt and grime and grease down the shower drain. The water runs a sooty gray as it swirls at her feet, and she takes stock of her newly slim belly and her more slender hips, whittled away by a clear and cruel lack of daily bear claw in her diet.

The attendants help her into scrubs instead of a standard hospital gown at her request, but insist that she lie down to rest. The hospital issue bed is so much plusher and softer and larger than her previous accommodations, she sinks into the blankets, hopeful that when she wakes, she won’t still be alone. Reflexively, she scuttles close to the hand railing of the bed, as if she’s allowing space for another occupant, and as hard as she tries, she can’t help but picture exactly who that occupant would be.

“Where is she? Where is my angel? Bring her to me!”

“Morgan?” Morgan bursts in, loaded down with bags and bags of her belongings, as if he’s a style Sherpa. She catches sight of her purse, and a glittery sequined dress she wore to New Year’s Eve, and what looks to be her entire underwear drawer upended into a Barney’s bag.

“Dr. L!” He descends on her in a bear hug, and she momentarily worries that she may need another set of x-rays after he cracks her spine with the force of his affection. “Dr. L, you can’t ever leave me like that again. Never again. I was worried sick!” He pulls away briefly, just enough to allow her room to draw a breath, “But I wish you wouldn’t have tried to kill Dr. C. Prison is no place for a lady such as yourself.”

“I didn’t try to…wait, is he out of surgery? How is he? Can I see him?”

Sensing her urgency, Morgan pauses, his open face quirked into a question mark. “Do you care about Dr. C?”

“No, Morgan, I don’t care about him, I just care what happens to him…I mean, I care…Morgan, please find out how his surgery went.” She digs through her purse, finding her cell phone, which miraculously has a full charge and thousands of text messages waiting to be read.

Morgan smiles proudly. “I charged your phone, and found your favorite pajamas…every night I went to your apartment and turned down the sheets, in case you might have come home,”

She holds up a hand, “Okay, Morgan, don’t do that anymore. But thank you. I am really glad you’re here.” Mindy decides she’s only half lying; she’s happy the big galoot showed his face, but she’d be happier to see another one.

Morgan begins unpacking, lining up bras and underwear, and a garter belt she wore as a Halloween costume three years before, “I’ll sleep in your room, tonight, to keep you company. Of course, I brought my own overnight bag and an assortment of puppy photos for your perusal.”

“No, Morgan. Nope. No. No, you won’t.” She shakes her head, vehemently, grabbing the garter belt and stuffing it under her blanket. “Please, can you just find out about Dr. Castellano for me?”

Obediently, Morgan sets out on his mission, and Mindy’s left to her own devices, the quiet giving her more anxiety than relief. She flips through television channels, feeling like she’s just been released from a survivalist bunker, everything so bright and fast and loud around her, and she realizes that is probably how Danny feels all the time, when her cell phone buzzes on her tray table.

**Hurry, Dr. L. Room 432. Dr C isn’t going to make it**

She doesn’t hesitate as she jumps out of bed and careens into the hallway, bare feet slapping against the hospital’s linoleum corridor as she runs toward the room, her phone still vibrating in her hand. She arrives at the door, expecting to be assaulted by the shrill beep of a flat lining LCD monitor, but instead, she’s greeted by Morgan leaning over a clearly uncomfortable and slightly sedated but conscious and most notably, alive, Danny.

She glances back down at her phone, her chest still heaving from the exertion of sudden physical activity:

 **Down to your room; he’s too tired from surgery. Surgery went well, b.t.double u**.

 _Damnit Morgan_. “Hey, Morgan, can I see Danny alone, please? And anyway, I swore I heard some barking coming from down near the mop closet?” It takes some extra non-verbal cues, complete with meaningful eyebrow raises and several stink eyes before Morgan reluctantly retreats, hugging them both one more time “for the road.” Mindy has a sneaking suspicion that Morgan will never again allow either of them to leave his sight without copious amounts of inappropriate touching, and it is going to make patients super uncomfortable at check-ups.

Mindy preens in the doorway, not knowing if she should just charge right in and attack his face with her lips, or if she should play it cool, a speed that she doesn’t usually have on her relationship dial, “It’s time for your sponge bath!”

“Please don’t say that; Morgan already tried to give me one, and frankly, he got pretty far.” From the perturbed look on his face, Danny’s flashbacks are probably far more likely to come from whatever Morgan inflicted on him in the last twenty minutes than anything that happened the past two weeks in Psycho Basement. “Come here.” He flashes a supernova of a smile, radiating energy to every bit of his beautiful, tired and still dirty face, and Mindy almost isn’t sure where to look.

She perches on the edge of his bed, Danny’s hand brushing against her hip. She can’t remember if she’s playing it cool or not, with his eyes all crinkly, and she’s afraid when she opens her mouth, the only thing that’s going to come out is high pitched giggling.

Confusion flits across his features, just for a split second, and it’s apparent that Danny might not exactly have a plan for where to put his eyes, either, “Hey, what happened to your hands?” He gestures to her knuckles, taped and bandaged, some of the rawer edges still exposed.

“I may have, um, tried to claw my way out so I could get you help?”

“For me?” He bites his lip, brushing at his eye with the back of his free hand, but he recovers rather quickly. “Does it still hurt?”

“I’m fine, Danny. Can I just---can I talk to you for a second?”  Up close, it’s fairly apparent that Danny isn’t at a hundred percent mental faculties, and Mindy feels guilty, as if she’s counting on the medication to slow his reflexes. Maybe he won’t run. He can’t run.

“Whaz it Min?”

 _Oh God he’s still totally hopped up on’ ludes._ “I just wanted to say, that I totally understand if you—what happened when we were—I get it if we just chalk it up to the basement, and the PB and Js and the fear of imminent death---“

“What are you talking about, Mindy?” Danny’s lucidity suddenly spikes, just at the exact wrong moment, because he’s Danny, and that’s how he operates.

“I’m talking about—I know it was a stressful situation what we went through, and in stress, people tend to do things that they wouldn’t normally do—“

“You weren’t a reaction to stress, Mindy.”

“I wasn’t?”

“No.” He shakes his head resolutely.

“Were you a stress reaction?”

“For you? How would I know? Am I?”

She surveys his face, so open and now so familiar, even with the Grizzly Adams beard, “I don’t think so.”

“So, now what?” He looks at her expectantly.

“I don’t know, I think I probably need a nap.”

“Well, get in here.” He gestures to the tiny space on the edge of bed, and Mindy pretzels herself to fit in next to him without disrupting any important medical equipment.

“Danny?” She says, into his neck.

“Yeah?”

“I really like this.”

“Me too.”

They sit in a silence for a few minutes, listening to the _blip_ of Danny’s heart rate monitor, “I think I found the title of our Mindy Fever article. _Taken With You_.” She gestures into the air, as if the name floats over the bed in lights, “It has double meaning, you know.”

Danny pinches at her waist, his beard rubbing against her cheek as he play-acts envisioning the marquee title, “That it does. Wait, when did I agree to Mindy Fever?”

“You did now, buster.” Mindy pokes him in the chest with her index finger.

He shrugs, “Eh, I was kind of attached to the Castellano Condition.”

“That was never on the table.”

“When was there a table? We’ve never discussed this. Plus, I really think we should stick with mine, because I already liked you…”

“Yeah you did.”

“And you actually fell for me, due to my indefatigable charm…”

“Oh, it was fatigued, my friend.”

Ignoring her objection, “Therefore, YOU fell victim to the Castellano Condition.”

“More like the Castellano Curse.” She scoffs.

He crosses himself, “Don’t say that. That’s a real thing. Are you trying to get us killed? Now we can never take a cruise. We’ll be shipwrecked.”

“You may actually have to have sex with a volleyball then.”

“I told you I was sorry about that!”

“No, you didn’t, actually. Because you were brutally beaten immediately following.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” Danny scratches at his chin, “Well, I’m sorry.”

She tugs at his facial hair, “This has to go. I miss your face.”

“You can shave it after our nap. Being almost dead all day is exhausting.” He yawns.

“All right, Wesley. That’ll be enough.”

Danny tilts her chin up toward his, and momentarily, she expects him to inspect her pupils again, but instead, his voice is gravelly and strange with emotion, “We started from the bottom and now we’re here.”

“Was that Drake?” She whispers, mostly afraid she’ll be sucked into the wormhole in the space time continuum that she’s clearly just entered, “Danny Castellano, did you just quote Drake at me?

He grins shyly, “I asked Morgan, while he was groping me. I don’t know what made me think of it.  These drugs are Doobie Brothers good.”

“That’s sweet. And kind of gross.”

He considers this for a second, caressing her check with his thumb, “I love you, Min.”

“I know.”

He blinks twice, “You did NOT just Han Solo me.”

“Well, I left my useful robot at home, and I did save your life, so…”

“I’m going to be hearing about this for a long time, aren’t I?”

“The longest.”


	14. Epilogue

ONE YEAR LATER

 

Mindy nuzzles into Danny's side, forming a crescent around him on the plush king size bed of their Royal Loft suite.  “I always knew I’d have a _Dateline_ special dedicated to me.”

“You did not.”

She nods, very seriously.  On her vision board, she's already listed:  1.  ~~Marry Michael Fassbender~~   Okay, fine, meh Marry Danny Castellano 2.  Get _Dateline_ special.  If _Dateline_ not available, E's _True Hollywood Story_.  3.  Bring Back E's _True Hollywood Story_

“You know you’re insane, right? That this is not normal human behavior?”   She used to think that eventually Danny would get used to her perspective on the world, but miraculously, he never has.  He always seems to be gaping, open-mouthed and incredulous, at pretty much everything she does and says.  He clearly doesn't adapt to change as quickly as she can.

“I don't want to be normal, Danny.  Normal is for people who wear Crocs and give up on life."

“I don't wear...I'm normal.  I love being normal.” Danny protests weakly, pointing the remote at the suite's flat screen television. “And you love that I’m normal. It balances you out.”

“Someone balances someone here, but I’m not sure which direction or why."

He ignores her, as he’s programmed to do, “So are you ready for this? It might bring back some...some stuff, and if you think that would be too hard to deal with, I won’t turn it on.”

“Our story is going to be on TELEVISION, Danny. I was born ready.”  They've had so many interviews with reporters, and answered the same questions so many times, but those were all for local news stations, and this is national fucking television.  Her entire life has led up to this moment.  She has entire sections of her wardrobe dedicated to this moment.  _Am I ready?  Pshaw, Danny._

“Just one more time, for me, you didn’t set this all up so you could be on tv did you?” He peers into her face, legitimately concerned.  From the little crease in his forehead, she reads that it’s not as far fetched as he’d like it to be. It’s actually probably a little too close-fetched for comfort.

She hits him with one of the fluffier pillows. She’s still gentle with his right side, even though his broken bones had healed fully months before. “I did not hire a man to half murder you for television exposure, Daniel. Now turn on the damn show.  I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Castellano."

Danny starts to press play, and stops, his forehead doing that perturbed creasing thing again, and she can't swear to it, but he seems to be getting increasingly sweaty, despite the forceful air conditioning in their room. “Listen, there’s something you should probably know—“

She gasps, “Oh my God, Mr. Accusatory, it was you!  You arranged our kidnapping, didn't you?”

“No, I did not hire someone to half murder me so you could get on _Dateline_ , of all things, and, if I’d done that, it would have come out in the trial, don’t you think?”

“You know I barely paid attention at that trial. There were so many lawyer things happening, and it made me so sleepy. It was nothing like the  _Good Wife._ Plus, I had just gotten that new phone….And anyway, you sure are protesting a lot. Is there something you want to tell me?”

“This room is really nice, isn’t it?” He bats at one of the pillows.  Danny is a lot of things but a great liar is not one of them.

Mindy pushes him on the chest, with both hands, “WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?”

“I don’t have a problem. Just turn the stupid thing on," Danny says, a ripple of annoyance in his tone, but he punches the remote button nonetheless.

Lester Holt's voice fills their room, “ _Mindy Lahiri’s story begins on a balmy autumn night, 2012, in da club_ ,”

Danny pauses, “Did Lester just say, IN DA CLUB?”

“Indeed he did.” 

“ _In da club, Tan-Tru, a Manhattan hot spot teeming with professional basketball players and Senator’s mistresses. This is where Mindy Lahiri and her co-workers went for a Work Night Out and where later, she would meet Josh Daniels for the first time. Little did she know, it would not be the last.”_

“This is super creepy, Danny, Lester’s using his murder voice.” 

“I can turn it off, Min. We know how it turned out.” He pushes a stray hair out of her face, and somehow, she can almost smell the mildew from the basement.   Maybe this isn't a great idea after all.  No matter how far she gets from the basement in Connecticut, even on a luxury cruise liner in the middle of the ocean, no space seems big enough.

“No, no, I need to watch this. It’s important.”

“It’s scaring you.”

“Push play.” 

Lester continues, “ _Mindy and Josh flirted, exchanged numbers, and when Ms. Lahiri was unable to attend a VIP after party, Josh Daniels became obsessed. He even had this note delivered to her:_ I bought this off Amar’e for five hundred dollars. You owe me dinner, _along with Mindy’s accidentally forgotten pashmina.  Little did Mindy Lahiri know, Josh Daniels believed that she owed him far, far more than dinner.”_

“This is chilling, Danny.”  She digs her fingers into the flesh of his upper arm, hiding her face in his shoulder.

“I’ll turn it off. I don’t want you to have the nightmares again.”

“No, no, I can’t be featured in prime time and just poo poo it because I’m a little creeped out.”

“Mindy, I’m a lot creeped out. Let’s just enjoy our vacation _Dateline_ -free.”

She considers for a few seconds and then reaches across Danny to press _play_ herself.

_“He began to follow Ms. Lahiri, learning her routine, plotting how and when he would finally make his move.”_

Josh, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, appears on screen. “I had been following Mindy for weeks, and I’d watched her shop and eat---once I watched her assault a hot dog vendor for not using enough mustard. I kept my distance, though, until I saw my opportunity. She was working late, in her office, something I was really surprised that she’d do—“

“Okay, Mr. Judgey Pants, you’re a drug addict and a criminal. I work hard for my money.”

“So I waited until I watched all of her co-workers filter out, one by one. I was high on cocaine, out of my mind, and I thought I counted them correctly. But I hadn’t.”

The voice over returns, _“Josh Daniels hadn’t counted on Daniel Castellano, Mindy’s co-worker, and fellow partner at Shulman and Associates, still being in the office. And he really didn’t count on what came next.”_

“So this little guy, Danny, comes out, and asks me what I’m doing there."

“Excuse me, I’m average height,"  Danny protests.

“See? So judgmental.”

“The worst.”

“I tell him, in not so many words, that I’m there for Mindy,” Josh looks into the camera, and Mindy feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. 

Sensing her apprehension, Danny grabs for her hand, and she squeezes,  still watching him out of the corner of her eye. 

“And he insists that if I take Mindy, I have to take him too.”

Mindy turns off the set,  “WHAT DID YOU DO, DANNY?”


End file.
